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THE 






JESUS OF HISTORY 



/ 



BY 

T. R. GLOVER 



,*, 



FELLOW OF ST. JOHNS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 
UNIVERSITY LECTURER IN ANCIENT HISTORY 



WITH A FOREWORD 

BY 

THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY 



Steaoctation $hreg* 

124 East 28th Street, New York 

1917 






Copyright, 1917, bt 
T. R. GLOVER 



MAR 23 1917 






PRINTED IN THE UNITED 1TATES OF AMERICA 



CL A 4 5 7 . r ) 5 5 






TO 



RICHARD GLOVER 



FOREWORD 

I regard it as a high privilege to be associated with 
this volume. Many who know and value Mr. Glover's 
work on The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman 
Empire must have wistfully desired to secure from his 
graphic pen just such a book as is here given to the 
world. He possesses the rare power of reverently handling 
familiar truths or facts in such manner as to make them 
seem to be almost new. There are few gifts more precious 
than this at a time when our familiarity with the greatest 
and most sacred of all narratives is a chief hindrance to 
our ready appreciation of its living power. I believe 
that no one will read Mr. Glover's chapters, and especially 
his description of the parable-teaching given by our 
Lord, without a sense of having been introduced to 
a whole series of fresh and fruitful thoughts. He has 
expanded for us with the force, the clearness, and the 
power of vivid illustration which we have learned to 
expect from him, the meaning of a sentence in the earlier 
volume I have alluded to, where he insists that, "Jesus 
of Nazareth does stand in the center of human history, 
that He has brought God and man into a new relation, 
that He is the present concern of every one of us and 
that there is more in Him than we have yet accounted 
for." 1 

In accordance with its title, the single theme of the 

1 The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire, p. 157 

v" 



VI 



FOREWORD 



book is "The Jesus of History," but the student or ex- 
ponent of dogmatic theology will find abundant material 
in its pages. 

I commend it confidently, both to single students 
and to those who nowadays, in happily increasing num- 
bers, meet together for common study; and I congratu- 
late those who belong to the Student Christian Movement 
upon this notable addition to the books published in 
connection with their far-reaching work. 



Lambeth, 
Advent Sunday, 1916. 



RANDALL CANTUAR. 



PREFACE 

This book has grown out of lectures upon the historical 
Jesus given in a good many cities of India during the 
winter of 1915-16. Recast and developed, the lectures 
were taken down in shorthand in Calcutta; they were 
revised in Madras; and most of them were wholly re- 
written, where and when in six following months leisure 
was available, in places so far apart as Colombo, Maymyo, 
Rangoon, Kodaikanal, Simla, and Poona. The reader 
will not expect a heavy apparatus of references to books 
which were generally out of reach. 

Here and there are incorporated passages (re- 
handled) from articles that have appeared in The 
Conservative Quarterly, The Nation, The Expositor, and 
elsewhere. 

Those who themselves have tried to draw the like- 
ness attempted in this book will best understand, and 
perhaps most readily forgive, failures and mistakes, or even 
worse, in my drawing. The aim of the book, as of the 
lectures, is, after all, not to achieve a final presentment 
of the historical Jesus, but to suggest lines of study 
that will deepen our, interest in him and our love of 

him. 

T. R. G. 

Poona* August, 1916 



rii 



PUBLISHERS' NOTE 

"The Jesus of History" was prepared for the British 
Student Christian Movement, and published in Great 
Britain by that organization. The author is so well- 
known in this country, especially among students, that it 
has seemed to the publishers that his suggestive book 
should be made available in America. 



via 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 
THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS 

PAGE 

Modern study of religion 1 

Historicity of Jesus 5 

The Gospels as historical sources 7 

Canons for the study of a historical figure 18 

A caution against antiquarianism here 21 

CHAPTER II 

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 

References in Gospels 24 

Utilization of the parables to reconstruct the domestic life . . 26 
Nature. The city. The talk of the market 29-35 

CHAPTER III 

THE MAN AND HIS MIND 

Words and looks, as recorded in the Gospels 43 

Playfulness of speech 47 

Movements of feeling , . . . . 49 

Habits of thought: 

e.g. Quickness. Feeling for fact. Sympathy. Imagination. 51-55 
His use of the Old Testament 59 

CHAPTER IV 
THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 

The Background 

Hardness of human life in those times 63 

ix 



x THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

PAGE 

Uncertainty as to God's plans for the nation — specially as to 

His purposes for the Messiah 67 

Uncertainty as to the immortality of the soul, and its 

destinies 68 

Reaction of all this upon life 69 

The Problem Before the Teacher 

To induce people to try to re-think God 70 

To secure the re-thinking of life from its foundations in view 

of the new knowledge 72 

The Teacher and the Disciples 

His personality, and his genius for friendship 73 

The disciples — the type he prefers 77 

Intimacy, the real secret of his method 78 

His ways of speech 81 

His seriousness 83 

The transformation of the disciples 85 

CHAPTER V 
THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 

Jesus' own God-Consciousness 

The nearness of God 89 

God's knowledge and power „ 90 

God's throne 91 

Jesus emphasizes mostly God's interest in the individual 

— the love of God 92 

The Knowledge of God 

The discovery of God 97 

Parables of the treasure finder and the pearl merchant 101 

Faith in God 104 

Prayer 106 

Life on the basis of God 113 



CONTENTS xi 

CHAPTER VI 
JESUS AND MAN 

PAGE 

Jesus' sympathy with men and their troubles 115 

His feelings for the suffering and distressed 117 

His feeling for women and children 125 

His emphasis on tenderness and forgiveness 127 

The characteristics which he values in men 129 

The value of the individual soul 133 

Jesus and the wasted life 136 

Zacchaeus. The woman with the alabaster box. The pen- 
itent thief 136 

CHAPTER VII 

JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 

The problem of sin 139 

John the Baptist on sin . 142 

Jesus' psychology of sin more serious 150 

The outstanding types of sin which, according to Jesus, 
involve for a man the utmost risk: 

(a) Want of tenderness 152 

(b) The impure imagination 154 

(c) Indifference to truth 155 

(d) Indecision 158 

Jesus' view of sin as deduced from this teaching 158 

Implication of a serious view of redemption 163 

CHAPTER VIII 

THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS 

What the cross meant to him 166 

His References to the Gospel and its Results 

The kingdom of heaven 168 

The call for followers 169 

His announcement of purpose in his life and death 169 

What he means by redemption 170 



** 



xii THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

PAGE 

Factors in His Choice of the Cross 

His sense of human need 176 

His realization of God 176 

His recognition of his own relation to God 177 

His prayer life 178 

Verification from the Event 

The Resurrection 178 

The new life of the disciples 178 

The taking away of the sin of the world 179 

Re-examination of His Choice of the Cross 

As it bears on the problem of pain 180 

and of sin 180 

and on God 181 

How a man is to understand Jesus Christ 181 

CHAPTER IX 

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 

The Roman Empire 

One~rule of many races 185 

General peace and free intercourse the world over 185 

Fusion of cultures, traditions, religions 186 

"The marriage of East and West" 186 



The Old Religion 

(1) Its strength: 187 

in its ancient tradition 187 

in its splendor of art, architecture, and ceremony. ... 188 

in its oracles, healings, and theophanies 190 

in its adaptability in absorbing all cults and creeds. . 191 

(2) Its weakness: 191 

No deep sense of truth 192 

No association with morality 192 

Polytheism 194 

The fear of the grave 195 



CONTENTS xiii 

PAGE 

(S) Its defence: 195 

Plutarch — the Stoics — Neo-Platonism — the Eclectics. 195-198 

The Victory of the Christian Church 

(1) Its characteristics 199 

(2) Persecuted because it refused to compromise 200 

(3) The Christian "out-lived" the pagan 201 

"out-died" him 202 

"out-thought" him 203 

CHAPTER X 

JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 

The impulse to determine who he is, and his relation to God . 206 

The records of Christian experience 209 

The study of the personality of Jesus Christ 214 

(a) in Gospels 214 

(6) Christologieal theory a guide to experience 215 

(c) The new experience of the Reformation period 217 

Knowledge gained by experiment comes before explanation. 218 

Jesus to be Known by what He Does 

The forgiveness of sin, and the theories to explain it 219 

Is a theology of Redemption possible which shall not be 

mainly metaphor and simile? 220 

The Problem of the Incarnation 

The approach is to be a posteriori 223 

In fact, God and man are only known to us in and by Jesus. 
Only in Christ is the love of God as taught in N. T. tenable. 

To know Jesus in what he can do, is antecedent to theory 

about him 225 



That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
Or decomposes but to recompose, 
Become my universe that feels and knows. 



Robert Browning 
Epilogue to Dramatis Persona 



xiv 



THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

CHAPTER I 

THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS 

If one thing more than another marks modern thought, 
it is a new insistence on fact. In every sphere of study 
there is a growing emphasis on verification. Where 
a generation ago a case seemed to be closed, to-day 
in the light of new facts it is reopened. Matters that 
to our grandfathers were trivialities, to be summarily 
dismissed, are seriously studied. Again and again we 
find the most fruitful avenues opened to us by questions 
that another age might have laughed out of a hearing; 
to-day they suggest investigation of facts insufficiently 
known, and of the difficult connections between them. 
In psychology and in medicine the results of this new 
tendency are evident in all sorts of ways — new methods 
in the treatment of the sick, new inquiries as to the origin 
of diseases and the possibilities of their prevention, at- 
tempts to get at the relations between the soul and body, 
and a very new open-mindedness as to the spiritual nature 
and its working and experiences. In other fields of learn- 
ing it is the same. 

To the modern student of man and his history the old 
easy way of excluding religion as an absurdity, the light pre- 
diction of its speedy, or at least its eventual, disappearance 

l 



2 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

from the field of human life, and other dogmatisms 
of the like kind, are almost unintelligible. We realize 
that religion in some form is a natural working of the 
human spirit, and, whatever place we give to religion 
in the conduct of our own lives, as students of history 
we reckon with the religious instinct as a factor of the 
highest import, and we give to religious systems and 
organizations — above all, to religious teachers and 
leaders — a more sympathetic and a profounder study. 
Carlyle's lecture on Mohammed, in his course on "Heroes 
and Hero Worship," may be taken as a landmark for 
English people in this new treatment of history. 

The Christian Church, whether we like it or not, 
has been a force of unparalleled power in human affairs; 
and prophecies that it will no longer be so, and allegations 
that by now it has ceased to be so, are not much made 
by cautious thinkers. There is evidence that the in- 
fluence of the Christian Church, so far from ebbing, 
is rising — evidence more obvious when we reflect that 
the influence of such a movement is not to be quickly 
guessed from the number of its actual adherents. A 
century and a quarter of Christian missions in India 
have resulted in so many converts — a million and a 
quarter is no slight outcome; but that is a small part 
of the story. All over India the old religious systems 
are being subjected to a new study by their own adherents; 
their weak points are being felt; there are reform move- 
ments, new apologetics, compromises, defenses — all sorts 
of indications of ferment and transition. There can b< 
little question that while many things go to the makinj 
of an age, the prime impulse to all this intellectual, 
religious, and moral upheaval was the faith of Christian^ 



THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS 3 

missionaries that Jesus Christ would bring about what 
we actually see. They believed — and they were laughed 
at for their belief — that Jesus Christ was still a real 
power, permanent and destined to hold a larger place in 
the affairs of men; and we see that they were right. 
Jesus remains the very heart and soul of the Christian 
movement, still controlling men, still capturing men — 
against their wills very often — changing men's lives 
and using them for ends they never dreamed of. So 
much is plain to the candid observer, whatever the 
explanation. 

We find, further, another fact of even more significance 
to the historian who will treat human experience with 
seriousness and sympathy. The cynical view that 
delusion and error in a real world have peculiar power 
in human affairs, may be dismissed; no serious student 
of history could hold it. For those who believe, as 
we all do at heart, that the world is rational, that real 
effect follow real causes, and conversely that behind 
great movements lie great forces, the fact must weigh 
enormously that wherever the Christian Church, or a 
section of it, or a single Christian, has put upon Jesus 
Christ a higher emphasis — above all where everything 
has been centered in Jesus Christ — there has been an 
increase of power for Church, or community, or man. 
Where new value has been found in Jesus Christ, the 
Church has risen in power, in energy, in appeal, in victory. 
Paul of Tarsus progressively found more in Christ, 
expected more of him, trusted him more; and his faith 
was justified. If Paul was wrong, how did he capture 
the Christian Church for his ideas? If he was wrong, 
how is it that when Luther caught his meaning, re- 



4 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

interpreted him and laid the same emphasis on Jesus 
Christ with his Nos nihil sumus, Christus solus est omnia, 1 
once more the hearts of men were won by the higher doc- 
trine of Christ's person and power, and a new era followed 
the new emphasis? How is it that, when John Wesley 
made the same discovery, and once more staked all on 
faith in Christ, again the Church felt the pulse of new 
life? On the other hand, where through a nebulous 
philosophy men have minimized Jesus, or where, through 
some weakness of the human mind, they have sought 
the aid of others and relegated Jesus Christ to a more 
distant, even if a higher, sphere — where, in short, Christ 
is not the living center of everything, the value of the 
Church has declined, its life has waned. That, to my 
own mind, is the most striking and outstanding fact in 
history. There must be a real explanation of a thing so 
signal in a rational universe. 

The explanation in most human affairs comes after 
the recognition of the fact. There our great fact stands 
of the significance of Jesus Christ — a more wonderful 
thing as we study it more. We may fail to explain it, 
but we must recognize it. One of the weaknesses of the 
Church to-day is — put bluntly — that Christians are not 
making enough of Jesus Christ. 

We find again that, where Jesus Christ is most real, 
and means most, there we are apt to see the human 
mind reach a fuller freedom and achieve more. There 
is a higher civilization, a greater emphasis on the value 
of human life and character, and a stronger endeavor 
for the utmost development of all human material, 



We are nothing; Christ alone is all." 



THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS 5 

if we may so call the souls and faculties of men. Why 
should there be this correspondence between Jesus of 
Nazareth and human life? It is best brought out, when 
we realize what he has made of Christian society, and 
contrast it with what the various religions have left 
or produced in other regions — the atrophy of human 
nature. 

In fine, there is no figure in human history that signifies 
more. Men may love him or hate him, but they do it 
intensely. If he was only what some say, he ought 
to be a mere figure of antiquity by now. But he is 
more than that; Jesus is not a dead issue; he has to be 
reckoned with still; and men, who are to treat mankind 
seriously, must make the intellectual effort to under- 
stand the man on whom has been centered more of the 
interest and the passion of the most serious and the 
best of mankind than on any other. The real secret 
is that human nature is deeply and intensely spiritual, 
and that Jesus satisfies it at its most spiritual point. 

The object before us in these pages is the attempt 
to know Jesus, if we can, in a more intimate and in- 
telligent way than we have done — at least, to put before 
our minds the great problem, Who is this Jesus Christ? 
and to try to answer it. 

One answer to this question is that Jesus was nothing, 
never was anything, but a myth developed for religious 
purposes; that he never lived at all. This view reap- 
pears from time to time, but so far it has not appealed to 
any who take a serious interest in history. No historian 
of the least repute has committed himself to the theory. 
Desperate attempts have been made to discredit the 
Christian writers of the first two centuries; it has been 



6 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

emphasized that Jesus is not mentioned in secular writers 
of the period, and the passage in Tacitus (Annals, xv. 44) 
has been explained away as a Christian interpolation, or, 
more gaily, by reviving the wild notion that Poggio 
Bracciolini forged the whole of the Annals. But such 
trifling with history and literature does not serve. No 
scholar accepts the theory about Poggio — and yet if the 
passage about Christ is to be got rid of, this is the better 
way of the two; for there is nothing to countenance the 
view that the chapter is interpolated, or to explain when 
or by whom it was done — the wish is father to the thought. 
Christians are twice mentioned by Suetonius in dealing 
with Emperors of the first century, though in one passage 
the reading Chrestus for Christus has suggested to some 
scholars that another man is meant; the confusion was 
a natural one and is instanced elsewhere, but we need 
not press the matter. The argument from silence is 
generally recognized as an uncertain one. Sir James 
Melville, living at the Court of Mary, Queen of Scots, 
does not, I learn, mention John Knox — "whom he could 
not have failed to mention if Knox had really existed 
and played the part assigned to him by his partisans," 
and so forth. It might be as possible and as reasonable 
to prove that the Brahmo Samaj never existed, by dem- 
onstrating four hundred years hence — or two thousand — 
that it is not mentioned in In Memoriam, nor in The 
Ring and the Book, nor in George Meredith's novels, 
nor (more strangely) in any of Mr. Kipling's surviving 
works, which definitely deal with India. None of these 
writers, it may be replied, had any concern to mention 
the Brahmo Samaj. And when one surveys the Greek 
and Roman writers of the first century a. d., which of 



THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS 7 

them had any concern to refer to Jesus and his disciples, 
beyond the historians who do? Indeed, the difficulty is to 
understand why some of these men should have written 
at all; harder still, why others should have wanted to 
read their poems and orations and commonplace books. 
One argument, advanced in India a few years ago, against 
the historical value of the Gospels may be revived by 
way of illustration. Would not Virgil and Horace, it 
was asked, have taken notice of the massacre at Bethlehem, 
if it was historical? Would they not? it was replied, 
when they both had died years before its traditional date. 
But the distinction between Christian and secular 
writers is not one that will weigh much with a serious 
historian. Until we have reason to distinguish between 
book and book, the evidence must be treated on exactly 
the same principles. To say abruptly that, because 
Luke was a Christian and Suetonius a pagan, Luke 
is not worthy of the credence given to Suetonius, is a 
line of approach that will most commend itself to those 
who have read neither author. To gain a real knowledge 
of historical truth, the historian's methods must be 
slower and more cautious, he must know his author in- 
timately — his habits of mind, his turns of style, his 
preferences, his gifts for seeing the real issue — and always 
the background, and the ways of thinking that prevail 
in the background. An ancient writer is not necessarily 
negligible because he records, and perhaps believes, 
miracles or marvels or omens which a modern would 
never notice. It is bad criticism that has made a popular 
legend of the unreliable character of Herodotus. As 
our knowledge of antiquity grows, and we become able 
to correct our early impressions, the credit of Herodotus 



8 



THE JESUS OF HISTORY 



rises steadily, and to-day those who study him most 
closely have the highest opinion of him. 

We may, then, without prejudice, take the evidence 
of Paul of Tarsus on the historicity of Jesus, and examine 
it. If we are challenged as to the genuineness of Paul's 
epistles, let us tell our questioner to read them. Novels 
have been written in the form of correspondence; but 
Paul's letters do not tell us all that a novelist or a forger 
would — there are endless gaps, needless references to un- 
known persons (needless to us, or to anybody apart from 
the people themselves), constant occupation with ques- 
tions which we can only dimly discover from Paul's 
answers. The letters are genuine letters — written for 
the occasion to particular people, and not meant for us. 
The stamp of genuineness is on them — of life, real life. 
The German scholar, Norden, in his Kunstprosa, says 
there is much in Paul that he does not understand, but 
he catches in him again after three hundred years that 
note of life that marks the great literature of Greece. That 
is not easily forged. Luther and Erasmus were right 
when they said — each of them has said it, however it 
happened — that Paul "spoke pure flame." The letters, 
and the theology and its influence, establish at once Paul's 
claim to be a historical character. We may then ask, how 
a man of his ability failed to observe that a non-historical 
Jesus, a pure figment, was being palmed off on him — 
on a contemporary, it should be marked — and by a com- 
bination of Jesus' own disciples with earlier friends 
of Paul, who were trying to exterminate them. Paul 
knew priests and Pharisees; he knew James and John 
and Peter; and he never detected that they were in 
collusion, yes, and to the point of martyring Stephen 



THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS 9 

— to impose on him and on the world a non-historical 
Jesus. To such straits are we brought, if Jesus never 
existed. History becomes pure nonsense, and knowl- 
edge of historical fact impossible; and, it may be noted, 
all knowledge is abolished if history is beyond reach. 

But we are not dependent on books for our evidence 
of the historicity of Jesus. The whole story of the 
Church implies him. He is inwrought in every fea- 
ture of its being. Every great religious movement, 
of which we know, has depended on a personal impulse, 
and has behind it some real, living and inspiring per- 
sonality. It is true that at a comparatively late stage 
of Hinduism a personal devotion to Shri Krishna grew 
up, just as in the hour of decline of the old Mediter- 
ranean paganism we find Julian the Apostate using a 
devotional language to Athena at Athens that would 
have astonished the contemporaries of Pericles. But 
Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed stand on a very dif- 
ferent footing from Krishna and Athena, even if we 
concede the view of some scholars that Krishna was 
once a man, and the contention of Euhemerus, a pre- 
Christian Greek, that all the gods had once been human. 
If we posit that Jesus did not exist, we shall be involved 
in other difficulties as to the story of the Church. Mr. 
F. C. Conybeare, an Oxford scholar avowedly not in 
allegiance to the Christian Church, has characterized 
some of the reconstructions made by contemporary anti- 
Christian writers as more miraculous than the history 
they are trying to correct. 

We come now to the Gospels; and in what follows, 
and throughout the book, we shall confine ourselves 
to the first three Gospels. Great as has been, and 



10 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

must be, the influence of the Fourth Gospel, in the 
present stage of historical criticism it will serve our 
purpose best to postpone the use of a source which we 
do not fully understand. The exact relations of his- 
tory and interpretation in the Fourth Gospel — the 
methods and historical outlook of the writer — cannot 
yet be said to be determined. "Only those who have 
merely trifled with the problems it suggests are likely 
to speak dogmatically upon the subject." 1 This is not 
to abandon the Fourth Gospel; for it is a document 
which we could not do without in early Church His- 
tory, and which has vindicated its place in the devo- 
tional life in every Christian generation. But, for the 
present, the first Three Gospels will be our chief sources. 

The Gospels have, of course, been attacked again 
and again. Sober criticism has raised the question 
as to whether here and there traces may be found of 
the touch of a later hand — for example, were there two 
asses or one, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem? has the 
baptismal formula at the end of Matthew been adjusted 
to the creed of Nicaea? In the following pages the at- 
tempt will be made to base what is said not on isolated 
texts, which may — and of course may not — have been 
touched, but on the general tenor of the books. A 
single episode or phrase may suffer change from a copy- 
ist's hand, from inadvertence or from theological pre- 
dilection. The character of the Personality set forth 
in the Gospels is less susceptible of alteration. 

This point is at once of importance, for the sugges- 
tion has been made that we cannot be sure of any paf ^ 



1 Canon Streeter in Foundations, p. 82. 



THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS 11 

ticular statement, episode, incident or saying in the 
Gospels — taken by itself. Let us for the moment imagine 
a more sweeping theory still — that no single episode 
or incident or saying of Jesus in the Gospels is authentic 
at all. What follows? The great historian, E. A. Free- 
man of Oxford, once said that a false anecdote may 
be good history; it may be sound evidence for character, 
for, to obtain currency, a false anecdote has also to 
be true; it must be, in our proverbial phrase, "if not 
true, well invented." Even if exaggeration and humor 
contribute to give it a twist, the essence of parody is 
that it parodies — it must conform to the original even 
where it leaves it. A good story-teller will hardly tell 
the same story of Mr. Roosevelt and the Archbishop 
of Canterbury — unless it happens to be true, and then 
he will be cautious. "Truth," to quote another proverb, 
"is stranger than fiction"; because fiction has to go 
warily to be probable, and must be, more or less, con- 
ventional. The story a man invents about another 
has to be true in some recognizable way to character 
— as a little experiment in this direction will show. The 
inventor of a story must have the gift of the caricaturist 
and of the bestower of nicknames; he must have a shrewd 
eye for the real features of his victim.* Jesus, then, was 
a historical person; and about him we have a mass of 
stories in the Gospels, which our theory for the moment 
asks us to say are all false; but they have a certain unity 
of tone, and they agree in pointing to a character of a 
certain type, and the general aspects and broad out- 
i-ies of that character they make abundantly clear. 
Even on such a hypothesis we can know something 
of the character of Jesus. But the hypothesis is gratu- 



12 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

itous, and absurd, as the paragraphs that follow may 
help to show. The Gospels are essentially true and 
reliable records of a historical person. 

A survey of some of the outstanding features of the 
Gospels should do something to assure their reader 
of their historical value. But there is a necessary cau- 
tion to be given at this moment. When Aristotle dis- 
cusses happiness, he adds a curious limitation — "as 
the man of sense would define." He postulates a cer- 
tain intelligence of the matter in hand. Similarly 
Longinus, the greatest of ancient critics, says that in 
literature sure judgment is the outcome of long experi- 
ence. In matters of historical and literary criticism, 
a certain instinct is needed, conscious or unconscious, 
perhaps more often the latter, which without a serious 
interest and a long experience no man is likely to have. 

The Gospels are not properly biographies; they con- 
sist of collections of reminiscences' — memories and frag- 
ments that have survived for years, and sometimes 
the fragment is little more than a phrase. Such and 
such were the circumstances, and Jesus spoke — a story 
that may occupy four or five verses, or less. Some- 
thing happened, Jesus said or did something that im- 
pressed his friends, and they could never forget it. The 
story, as such impressions do, keeps its sharp edges. 
Date and perhaps even place may be forgotten, but 
the look and the tone of the speaker are indelible mem- 
ories. In the experience of every man there are such 
moments, and the reminiscences can be trusted. The 
Gospels are almost avowedly not first-hand. Peter 
is said to be behind Mark; Mark and at least one other 
are behind Matthew and Luke. Luke in his preface 



THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS 13 

explains his methods. They are collectors and trans- 
mitters; and the indications are that they did their work 
very faithfully. 

There is a simplicity and a plainness about the stories 
in the Gospels, which further guarantees them. It is 
remarkable how little of the adjective there is — no com- 
pliment, no eulogy, no heroic touches, no sympathetic 
turn of phrase, no great passages of encomium or com- 
mendation. It is often said about the Greek historian, 
Thucydides, that, among his many intellectual judgments, 
he never offers a criticism of any act that implies moral 
approbation or disapprobation; that he says nothing 
to show that he had feelings or that he cared about ques- 
tions of right and wrong. Page after page of Thucydides 
will make the reader tingle with pity or indignation; 
there is hardly in literature so tragic a story as the 
Syracusan expedition — and the writer did not feel! 
Is it not the sternest and deepest feeling, after all, when 
a man will not "unpack his heart with words"? Some- 
thing of this kind we find in the Gospels. There is 
not a word of condemnation for Herod or Pilate, for 
priest or Pharisee; not a touch of sympathy as the nails 
are driven through those hands; a blunt phrase about 
the soldiers, "And sitting down they watched him there" 
(Matt, xxvii. 36) — that is all. (From a literary point 
of view, what a triumph of awful, quiet objectivity! 
and they had no such aim.) Luke indeed has one slight 
touch that might be called irony 1 — "And he released 
unto them him that for sedition and murder was cast 
into prison, whom they had desired; but he delivered 



1 Cf. the foreigner's touch at Athens (Acts xvii. 21). 



14 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

Jesus to their will" (Luke xxiii. 25) — and yet the irony 
is in the story itself. "Why callest thou me good?" 
So it is recorded that Jesus once answered a compliment 
(Matt. xix. 17); and it looks as if the mood had passed 
over to his intimates, and from them to their friends 
who wrote the Gospels. He meant too much for them 
to seek the facile relief of praise. The words of praise 
die away, yes, and the words of affection too; and their 
silence and self-restraint are in themselves evidence of 
their truth, and more winning than words could have been. 
Here and there the Gospels keep a phrase actually 
used by Jesus, and in his native Aramaic speech. The 
Greek was not apt to use or quote foreign phrases — 
unlike the Englishman who "has been at a great feast 
of languages and stolen the scraps." Why, then, do 
the Evangelists, writing for Greek readers, keep the 
Aramaic sentences? It looks like a human instinct 
that made Peter — if, as we are told, he had some part 
in the origination of Mark's Gospel — and the rest wish 
to keep the very words and tones of their Master, as 
most of us would wish to keep the accents and phrases 
of those we love. Was there no satisfaction to the people 
who had lived with Jesus, when they read in Mark the 
very syllables they had heard him use, and caught his 
great accents again? Is there not for Christians in 
every age a joy and an inspiration in knowing the very 
sounds his lips framed? The first word that his mother 
taught him survives in Abba (Father) — something of 
his own speech to let us begin at the beginning; some- 
thing, again, that takes us to the very heart of him at 
the end, in his cry: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani (Mark 
xv. 34). Is it not true that we come nearer to him in 



\ 






THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS 15 

that cry in the language strange to us, but his own? 
Would not the story, again, be poorer without the tender 
little phrase that he used to the daughter of Jairus (Mark 
v. 41)? 

From time to time we find in the Gospels matters 
for which the writers and those behind them have felt 
that some apology or at least some explanation was 
needed. His friendship for sinners was a taunt against 
him in his lifetime; so was his inattention to the Sab- 
bath (Mark ii. 24, iii. 2), and the details of ceremonial 
washing (Mark vii. 1-5). The faithful record of these 
is a sound indication both of the date 1 and of the truth 
of the Gospels. But these were not all. Celsus, in 
178 a.d., in his True Word, mocked at Jesus because 
of the cry upon the cross; he reminded Christians that 
many and many a worthless knave had endured in brave 
silence, and their Great Man cried out. It was from 
the Gospels that his knowledge came (Mark xv. 37), 
Even during his lifetime the Gospels reveal much about 
Jesus that in contemporary opinion would degrade 
him — sighs and tears and fatigue, liability to emotion 
and to pain, friendship with women. 

With these revelations of character we may group 
passages where the Gospels tell of Jesus surprising or 
shocking his disciples— startling them by some act or 
some opinion, for which they were not prepared, or 
which was contrary to common belief or practice — 
passages, too, where he blames or criticizes them for con- 
ventionality or unintelligence. 

1 Because, later on, the Sabbath and Jewish ceremony were not 
among the most living issues, after the Church had come to be 
chiefly Gentile. 






16 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

It has been remarked that the frequency and fidelity 
of Jesus' own allusions to country life, his illustrations 
from bird and beast and flower, and the work of the 
farm, are evidence for the genuineness of the tradition. 
Early Christianity, as we see already in the Acts of the 
Apostles, was prevailingly urban. Paul aimed at the 
great centers of population, where men gathered and 
from which ideas spread. The language of Paul in 
his epistles, the sermons inserted by Luke in the Acts, 
writings that survive of early Christians, are all in marked 
contrast to the speech of Jesus in this matter of country 
life. When we recall the practice of ancient historians 
of composing speeches for insertion in their narratives, 
and weigh the suggestion that the sermons in the Acts 
may conceivably owe much to the free rehandling of 
Luke or may even be his own compositions, there is a 
fresh significance in his marked abstention from any 
such treatment of the words of Jesus. It means that 
we may be secure in using them as genuine and un- 
touched reproductions 'of what he said and thought. 

This leads us to another point. The central figure 
of the Gospels must impress every attentive reader 
as at least a man of marked personality. He has his 
own attitude to life, his own views of God and man 
and all else, and his own language, as we shall see in 
the pages that follow. So much his own are all these 
things that it is hard to imagine the possibility of his 
being a mere literary creation, even if we could con- 
cede a joint literary creation by several authors writing 
independent works. Indeed, when we reflect on the 
character of the Gospels, their origin and composition, 
and then consider the sharp, strong outlines of the per- 




THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS 17 

sonality depicted, we shall be apt to feel his claim to 
historicity to be stronger than we supposed. 

Finally, two points may be mentioned. The Church 
from the very start accepted the Gospels. Two of 
them were written by men in Paul's own personal circle 
(Philemon 24; Col. iv. 10, 14). All found early accept- 
ance and wide use, 1 and after a century we find Irenaeus 
maintaining that four Gospels are necessary, and are 
necessarily all — there are four points of the compass, 
four seasons and so forth; therefore it is appropriate 
that there are four Gospels. The argument is not very 
convincing; but that such an argument was possible 
is evidence to the position of the Gospels as we have 
them. We must remember the solidarity of that early 
Church. The constituency, for which the Gospels 
were written, was steeped in the tradition of Jesus' life, 
and the Christians accepted the Gospels, as embody- 
ing what they knew; and there were still survivors from 
the first days of the Gospel. When Boswell's Life of 
Johnson was published, the great painter, Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, a lifelong friend of Johnson, said it might 
be depended upon as if delivered upon oath; Burke 
too had a high opinion of the book. In the same way 
the Gospels come recommended to us by those who 
knew Jesus, though, it is true, we do not know their 
names. 

The Gospels do not tell us all that Christians thought 
of Jesus, but they imply more than they say. The 
writers limited themselves. That Luke, for years a 
friend of Paul's, so generally kept his great friend's 

1 On this point see R. W. Dale, The Living Christ and the Four 
Gospels; and W. Sanday, The Gospels in the Second Century. 




18 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

theology, above all his Christology, out of his Gospel, 
is significant. It does not mean divergence of view. 
More reasonably we may conclude something else: he 
held to his literary and other authorities, and he was 
content; for he knew to what the historical Jesus brings 
men — to new life and larger views, to a series of new 
estimates of Jesus himself. He left it there. In what 
follows, we must not forget in our study that behind 
the Gospels, simple and objective as they are, is the 
larger experience of the ever-working Christ. 

There are three canons which may be laid down for 
the study of any human character, whether of the past 
or of to-day. They are so simple that it may hardly 
seem worth while to have stated them; yet they are 
not always very easy to apply. Without them the 
acutest critic will fail to give any sound account of a 
human character. 

First of all, give the man's words his own meaning. 
Make sure that every term he uses has the full value 
he intends it to carry, connotes all he wishes it to cover, 
and has the full emotional power and suggestion that 
it has for himself. Two quite simple illustrations may 
serve. The English-born clergyman in Canada who 
spoke of a meeting of his congregation as a "homely 
gathering" did not produce quite the effect he intended; 
"home-like" is one thing in Canada, "homely" quite 
another, and the people laughed at the slip — they knew, 
what he did not, that "homely" meant hard-featured 
and ugly. My other illustration will take us towards 
the second canon. I remember, years ago, a working- 
man of my own city talking a swift, impulsive Social- 
ism to me. He was young and something of a poet. 



; I 






THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS 19 

He got in return the obvious common sense that would 
be expected of a mid- Victorian, middle-aged and middle- 
class. And then he began to talk of hunger — the hunger 
that haunted whole streets in our city, where they had 
indeed something to eat every day, but never quite 
enough, and the children grew up so — the hunger that 
he had experienced himself, for I knew his story. With 
his eyes fixed on me, he brought home to me by the 
quiet intensity of his speech — whether he knew what 
he effected or not — that he and I gave hunger different 
senses. He gave the word for me a new meaning, with 
the glimpse he gave me of his experience. Since then 
I have always felt, when men fling theories out like 
his — schemes, too, like his — wild and impracticable: 
"Ah, yes! what is at the heart of it all? What but this 
awful experience which they have known and you have 
not — the sight of your own folk hungering, life and 
faculty wasted for want of mere food, and children grow- 
ing up atrophied from the cradle"? It is not easy to 
dissociate the language and the terms of others from 
the meaning one gives to them oneself; it means intel- 
lectual effort and intellectual discipline, a training of 
a strenuous kind in sympathy and tenderness; but if 
we are to be fair, it must be done. And the rule applies 
to Jesus also. Have we given his meaning to his term 
— force, value, emotion, and suggestion? In a later 
chapter we shall have to concentrate on one term of 
his — God — and try to discover what he intends that 
term to convey. 

The second canon is : Make sure of the experience 
behind the thought. How does a man come to think 
and feel as he does? That is the question antecedent 



i 



20 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

to any real criticism. What is it that has led him to 
such a view? It is more important for us to determine 
that, than to decide at once whether we think him right 
or wrong. Again and again the quiet and sympathetic 
study of what a man has been through will modify our 
judgment upon his conclusions; it will often change 
our own conclusions, or even our way of thinking. We 
have, then, to ask ourselves, What is the experience 
that leads Jesus to speak as he does, to think as he does? 
In his case, as in every other, the central and crucial 
question is, What is his experience of God? In other 
words, What has he found in God? what relations has 
he with God? what does he expect of God? what is 
God to him? Such questions, if we are candid and not 
too quick in answering, will take us a long way. It 
was once said of a man, busy with some labor problem, 
that he was "working it out in theory, unclouded by 
v single fact." Is it not fair to say that many of our 
current judgments upon Jesus Christ are no better 
founded? Can we say that we have any real, sure, and 
intimate knowledge of his experience of God? The 
old commentator, Bengel, wrote at the beginning of 
his book that a man, who is setting out to interpret 
Scripture, has to ask "by what right" he does it. What 
is our right to an opinion on Jesus Christ? 

The third canon will be: Ask of what type and of 
what dimensions the nature must be, that is capable 
of that experience and of that language. One of the 
commonest sources of bad criticism is the emphasis 
on weak points. The really important thing in crit- 
icism is to understand the triumphs of the poet or painter, 
let us say, whom we are studying. How came he to 



6 



THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS 21 

achieve poem or picture, so profound and so true? In 
what does he differ from other men, that he should do 
work so fundamental and so eternal? Lamb's punning 
jest at Wordsworth — that Wordsworth was saying he 
could have written Hamlet, if he had had the mind — 
puts the matter directly. What is the mind that can 
do such things? The historian will have to ask him- 
self a similar question about Jesus. 

Here we reach a point where caution is necessary. 
Will the Jesus we draw be an antiquary's Jesus — an 
archaic figure, simple and lovable perhaps, but quaint 
and old-world — in blunt language, outgrown? A Gal- 
ilean peasant, dressed in the garb of his day and place, 
his mind fitted out with the current ideas of his con- 
temporaries, elevated, it may be, but not essentially 
changed? A dreamer, with the clouds of the visionaries 
and apocalyptists ever in his head? When we look 
at the ancient world, the great men are not archaic fig- 
ures. Matthew Arnold found in Homer something of 
the clearness and shrewdness of Voltaire. There is 
nothing archaic about Plato or Virgil or Paul — to keep 
abreast of their thinking is no easy task for the strong- 
est of our brains, so modern, eternal, and original they 
are. They have shaped the thinking of the world and 
are still shaping it. How much more Jesus of Nazareth! 
When we make our picture of him, does it suggest the 
man who has stirred mankind to its depths, set the world 
on fire (Luke xii. 49), and played an infinitely larger 
part in all the affairs of men than any man we know 
i of in history? Is it a great figure? Does our emphasis 
fall on the great features of that nature — are they within 
our vision, and in our drawing? Does our explanation 






22 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

of him really explain him, or leave him more a riddle? 
What do we make of his originality? Is it in our pic- 
ture? What was it in him that changed Peter and 
James and John and the rest from companions into 
worshipers, that in every age has captured and con- 
trolled the best, the deepest, and tenderest of men? Are 
we afraid that our picture will be too modern, too little 
Jewish? These are not the real dangers. Again and 
again our danger is that we under-estimate the great 
men of our race, and we always lose by so doing. That 
we should over-estimate Jesus is not a real risk; the 
story of the Church shows that the danger has always 
been the other way. But not to under-estimate such 
a figure is hard. To see him as he is, calls for all we 
have of intellect, of tenderness, of love, and of greatness. 
It is worth while to try to understand him even if we 
fail. God, said St. Bernard, is never sought in vain, 
even when we do not find Him. Jesus Christ transcends 
our categories and classification; we never exhaust him; 
and one element of Christian happiness is that there 
is always more in him than we supposed. 



<\ 



CHAPTER II 

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 

It has been remarked as an odd thing by some readers 
that the Gospels tell us so little of the childhood of Jesus. 
It must be remembered, however, that they are not really 
biographies, even of the ancient order — still less of that 
modern kind, in which the main concern is a tracing 
of the psychological development of the man. Plutarch, 
the prince of ancient biographers, put fact and eulogy 
together, cited characteristic sayings or doings of his 
hero, quoted contemporary judgments, and wove the 
whole into a charming narrative, good to. read, pleasant 
to remember, perhaps not without use as a lesson in 
conventional morality; but with little real historical 
criticism in it, and as little, or less, attempt at any effec- 
tive reconstruction of a character. His biography of 
Pericles illustrates his method and his defects. 

The writers of the Gospels did not altogether propose 
biography as their object either in the ancient or the 
modern style. They left out — perhaps because it did 
not survive — much about the life of Jesus that we should 
like to know. The treatment of Mark by Matthew 
shows a certain matter-of-fact habit, which explains 
the obvious want of interest in aspects of the life and 
mind of Jesus that would to a modern be fascinating. 
They are dealing with the earthly life of the Son of God 
— and they deal with it with a faithfulness to tradition 

£3 



24 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

and reminiscence, which is, when we really consider it, 
quite surprising. But it is the heavenward side of the 
Master that mattered to them most, and it is perhaps 
not a mere random guess that they were not in any 
case so aware of the interest of childhood and of children 
as Jesus was. Matthew and Luke record the miraculous 
birth, and each adds a story, that has never failed to 
fascinate men, of the Magi or the Shepherds who came 
to the manger cradle. Luke gives one episode of Jesus' 
childhood. That is all. 

The writers of the Apocryphal Gospels did their best 
to fill the gap by inventing or developing stories, pretty, 
silly, or repellent, which only show how little they under- 
stood the original Gospels or the character of Jesus. 

But when we turn to the parables of Jesus, and ask 
ourselves how they came to be what they are, by what 
process of mind he framed them, and where he found 
the experience from which one and another of them 
spring, it is at once clear that a number of them are 
stories of domestic life, and the question suggests itself, 
Why should he have gone afield for what he found at 
home? If we know that he grew up in the ordinary 
circle of a home, and then find him drawing familiar 
illustrations from the common scenes of home, the in- 
ference is easy that he is going back to the remembered 
daily round of his own boyhood. 

In stray hints the Gospels give us a little of the frame- 
work 01 mat boyhood in Nazareth. The elder Joseph 
early disappears from the story, and we find a reference 
to four brothers and several sisters. "Is not this the 
carpenter?" people at Nazareth asked, "the son of Mary, 
the brother of James and Joseph, and of Judah and Simon? 



tm- 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 25 

and are not his sisters here with us?" (Mark vi. 3) ; Matthew 
adds a word that may or may not be significant — "his 
sisters, are they not all with us?' 5 (Matt. xiii. 56). In 
ancient times a particular view of the Incarnation, linked 
with other contemporary views of celibacy and the 
baseness of matter, led men to discover or invent the 
possibility that these brothers and sisters were either 
the children of Joseph by a former wife, or the cousins 
of Jesus on his mother's side. 1 That cousins in some 
parts of the world actually are confused in common 
speech with brothers may be admitted; but to the or- 
dinary Greek reader "brothers" meant brothers, and 
"cousins" something different No one, not starting 
with the theories of St. Jerome, let us say, on marriage 
and matter and the decencies of the Incarnation, would 
ever dream from the Greek narrative of the episode 
of the critical neighbors at Nazareth, who will not 
accept Jesus as a prophet because they know his family 
— a delightfully natural and absurd reason, with his- 
tory written plain on the face of it — that Jesus had 
no brothers, only cousins or half-brothers at best. When 
History gives us brothers, and Dogma says they must 
be cousins — in any other case the decision of the his- 
torian would be clear, and so it is here. 

We have then a household — a widow with five sons 

■ 

and at least two, or very likely more, daughters. Jesus 
is admittedly her eldest son, and is bred to be a carpen- 
ter; and a carpenter he undoubtedly was up to, we are 
told, about thirty years of age (Luke iii. 23). The dates 

1 The reader will see that I am referring to Bishop Lightfoot's 
article on " The Brethren of the Lord ' in his commentary on 
Galatians, but not accepting his conclusions. 



26 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

of his birth and death are not quite precisely determined, 
and people have fancied he may have been rather older 
at the beginning of his ministry. For our purposes it 
is not of much importance. The more relevant ques- 
tion for us is: How came he to wait till he was at least 
about thirty years old before he began to teach in public? 
One suggested answer finds the impulse, or starting- 
point, of his ministry in the appearance of John the 
Baptist. It is a simpler inference from such data as we 
have that the claims of a widowed mother with six or 
seven younger children, a poor woman with a carpenter's 
little brood to bring up, may have had something to do 
with his delay. In any case, the parables give us pic- 
tures of the undeniable activities of the household. 

A group of parables and other allusions illustrate 
the life of woman as Jesus saw it in his mother's house. 
He pictures two women grinding together at the mill 
(Luke xvii. 35), and then the heating of the oven (Matt, 
vi. 30) — the mud oven, not unlike the "field ovens" 
used for a while by the English army in France in 1915, 
and heated by the burning of wood inside it, kindled 
with "the grass of the field." Meanwhile the leaven 
is at work in the meal where the woman hid it (Matt, 
xiii. 33), and her son sits by and watches the heaving, 
panting mass — the bubbles rising and bursting, the fall 
of the level, and the rising of other bubbles to burst 
in their turn — all bubbles. Later on, the picture came 
back to him — it was like the Kingdom of God — "all 
bubbles!" said the disappointed, but he saw more clearly. 
The bubbles are broken by the force of the active life 
at work beneath — life, not death, is the story. The 
Kingdom of God is life; the leaven is of more account 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 27 

than any number of bubbles. And we may link all 
these parables from bread-making with what he says 
of the little boy asking for bread (Matt. vii. 9) — the 
mother fired the oven and set the leaven in the meal 
long before the child was hungry; she looked ahead 
and the bread was ready. Is not this written also in 
the teaching of Jesus — "y° ur heavenly Father knoweth 
that ye have need of all these things" (Matt. vi. 32)? 
God, he holds, is as little taken aback by his children's 
needs as Mary was by hers, and the little boys did not 
confine their demands to bread — they wanted eggs 
and fish as well (Matt. vii. 10; Luke xi. 11, 12; and cf. 
John vi. 9) — there was no end to their healthy appetites. 
It is significant that he mentions the price of the cheap- 
est flesh food used by peasants (Luke xii. 6). They 
also wanted clothes, and wore them as hard as boys do. 
The time would come when new clothes were needed; 
but why could not the old ones be patched, and passed 
down yet another stage? And his mother would smile 
— and perhaps she asked him to try for himself to see 
why; and he learnt by experiment that old clothes can- 
not be patched beyond a certain point, and later on 
he remembered the fact, and quoted it with telling effect 
(Mark ii. 21). He pictures little houses (Luke xi. 5-7) 
and how they are swept (Luke xi. 25) — especially when 
a coin has rolled away, into a dusty corner or under 
something (Luke xv. 8) ; and candles, and bushels (Matt. 
v. 15), and beds, and moth, and rust (Matt. vi. 19) and 
all sorts of things that make the common round of life, 
come into his talk, as naturally as they did into his life. 
The carpenter's shop, we may suppose, was close 
to the house — a shop where men might count on good 

I 



28 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

work and honest work; and what memories must have 
gathered round it! Is it fanciful to suggest that what 
the churches have always been saying, about "Coming 
to Jesus," began to be said in a natural and spontaneous 
way in that shop? Those little brothers and sisters 
did not always agree, and tempers would now and then 
grow very warm among them (cf. Luke vii. 32). And 
then the big brother came and fetched them away from 
the little house to the shop, and set one of them to pick 
up nails, and the other to sweep up shavings — to help 
the carpenter. They helped him. Like small boys, 
when they help, they got in his road at every turn. But 
somehow they slipped back to a jolly frame of mind. 
The big brother told them stories, and they came back 
different people. I can picture a day when there was 
a woman in the little house, weary and heavy-laden, 
and the door opened, and a cheery, pleasant face looked 
in, and said, "Won't you come and talk to me?" And 
she came and talked with him and life became a differ- 
ent thing for her. Are these pictures fanciful — mere 
imagination? Are we to think that all the tenderness 
of Jesus came to him by a miracle when he was thirty 
years of age? Must we not think it was all growing 
up in that house and in that shop? Or did he never 
tell a story — he who tells them so charmingly — till he 
wanted parables? We have to note, at the same time, 
some elements of criticism of the elder brother in the 
family attitude, some defect of sympathy and failure 
to understand him, even if kindness prompted their 
action in later days (Mark hi. 21, 31). 

Nazareth lies in a basin among hills, from the rim 
of which can be seen to the southward the historic plain 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 29 

of Esdraelon, and eastward the Jordan valley and the 
hills of Gilead, and westward the Mediterranean. On 
great roads, north and south of the town's girdle of 
hills, passed to and fro the many-colored traffic between 
Egypt and Mesopotamia and the Orient. Traders, 
pilgrims, Herods — "the kingdoms of the world and 
the glory of them" (Matt. iv. 8) — all within reach, and 
traveling no faster as a rule than the camel cared to 
go — they formed a panorama of life for a thoughtful 
and imaginative boy. More than one allusion to king's 
clothes comes in his recorded teaching (Matt. vi. 29, 
xi. 8), and it was here that he saw them — and noticed 
them and remembered. One is struck with the amount 
of that unconscious assimilation of experience which 
we find in his words, and which is in itself an index to 
his nature. We are not expressly told that he sought 
the sights that the road afforded; but it would be hard 
to believe that a bright, quick boy, with genius in him, 
with poetry in him, with feeling for the real and for 
life, never went down on to that road, never walked 
alongside of the caravans and took note of the strange 
people "from the east and from the west, from the north 
and from the south" (Luke xiii. 29) — Nubians, Egyptians, 
Romans, Gauls, Britons, and Orientals. 1 In the one 
anecdote that survives of his boyhood, we find men 
"astonished at his understanding" (Luke ii. 47), his 
gift for putting questions, and his comments on the 
answers; and all life through he had a genius for friend- 
ship. 

1 That this is not quite fanciful is shown by the emphasis laid 
by more or less contemporary writers on the increased facilities for 
i travel which the Roman Empire gave, and the use made of them. 



30 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

When we consider how Jesus handles Nature and 
her wilder children in his parables, another point attracts 
attention. Men vary a great deal in this. To take 
two of the Old Testament prophets, we find a marked 
difference here between Ezekiel and Jeremiah. Ezekiel 
"puts forth a riddle and speaks a parable" about an 
eagle — a frankly heraldic eagle, that plants a tree-top 
in a city of merchants (Ezek. xvii. 2-5). Jeremiah 
is obviously country-bred. He might have been sur- 
prised, if he had been told how often he illustrates his 
thought from bird and beast and country life — and 
always with a certain life-like precision and a perfectly 
clear sympathy. 

In the Gospels we find again the same faithfulness 
to living nature, another country-bred boy with the 
same love for bird and beast and the wild, open coun- 
try-side. 

The Earth 
And common face of Nature spake to me 
Rememberable things, 1 

Nature is enough for Jesus as for Jeremiah; she needs no 
remodeling, no heraldic paints — "long pinions of divers 
colors" — she will do as she is; she is just splendid and 
lovable and true as God made her; and she slides into his 
mind whenever he is deeply moved. Think of all the 
parables he draws from Nature — the similes, metaphors, 
and illustrations; every one of them will bear examination 
and means more the nearer we look into it, and the better 
we know the living thing behind. The eagle, in Jesus' 
sentence, plants no trees, but it has the living bird's 

1 Wordsworth, Prelude, i. 586. 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 31 

instinct for carrion; the ancient Greek historian and 
Lord Roberts at Delhi in 1858 remarked that "where- 
soever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered 
together" (Luke xvii. 37). In India that year, it was 
said, they gathered from all over to Delhi. What brought 
them? Instinct, we say; and we find Jesus, in that 
rather dark sentence, suggesting somehow that there 
is an instinct which knows "where." And sheep and 
cows and asses, and hens and sparrows, and red sunsets, 
fill men's reminiscences of his talk; and we may safely 
conclude that, when allusions are so many in fragments 
of conversation preserved as these are, the man's speech 
and mind were attuned to the love of bird and beast. 

Is there another teacher of those times who is at all 
so sure that God loves bird and flower? The Greek 
poet Meleager of Gadara — not so very far removed from 
Jesus in space of time — has a good deal to say about 
flowers, but not at all in the same sense as Jesus, not with 
any feeling such as his for the immortal hand and eye 
that planned their symmetry, and their colors and sweet- 
ness. St. Paul is conspicuously a man of the town — 
"a citizen of no mean city" (Acts xxi. 39), and he dismisses 
the animals abruptly (1 Cor. ix. 9); he has hardly an 
allusion to the familiar and homely aspects of Nature, 
so frequent and so pleasant in the speech of Jesus. He 
finds Nature, if not quite "red in tooth and claw,' 3 yet 
groaning together, subject to vanity, in bondage to 
corruption, travailing in pain, looking forward in a 
sort of desperate hope to a freedom not yet realized 
(Rom. viii. 19-24). Nature is far less tragic for Jesus, 
far happier — perhaps because he knew nature on closer 
terms of intimacy; Nature, as he portrays things, is 



32 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

in nearer touch with the Heavenly Father than we should 
guess from Paul, 1 and there is no hint in his recorded 
words that he held the ground to be under a curse. If 
we are to use abstract terms and philosophize his thought 
a little, we may agree that the four facts Jesus notes 
in Nature are its mystery, its regularity, its impartiality, 
and its peacefulness. 2 What he finds in Nature is not 
unlike what Wordsworth also finds — 

A Power 
That is the visible quality and shape 
And image of right reason; that matures 
Her processes by steadfast laws; gives birth 
To no impatient or fallacious hopes, 
No heat of passion or excessive zeal, 
No vain conceits; provokes to no quick turns 
Of self -applauding intellect; but trains 
To meekness, and exalts by humble faith; 
Holds up before the mind intoxicate 
With present objects, and the busy dance 
Of things that pass away, a temperate show 
Of objects that endure. 3 

This is not a passage that one could imagine the 
historical Jesus speaking, or, still less, writing; but 
the essential ideas chime in with his observation and 
his attitude — " for the earth bringeth forth fruit of 
herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full 
corn in the ear " (Mark iv. 28). Man can count safely 
on earth's cooperation. From it all, and in it all, Jesus 
read deep into God's mind and methods. 



1 Cf. F. G. Peabody, Jesus Christ and Christian Character, pp. 
57-60. 

2 H. S. Coffin, Creed of Jesus, pp. 240-242, 
8 Prelude xiii. 26 ff. 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 33 

It has often been remarked how apt Jesus was to 
go away to pray alone in the desert or on the hillside, 
in the night or the early dawn — probably no new habit 
induced by the crowded days of his ministry, but an 
old way of his from youth. The full house, perhaps, 
would prompt it, apart from what he found in the 
open. St. Augustine, in a very appealing confession, 
tells us how his prayers may be disturbed if he catch 
sight of a lizard snapping up flies on the wall of his 
room (Conf., x. 35, 57). The bird flying to her nest, 
the fox creeping to his hole (Luke ix. 58) — did these 

reak into the prayers of Jesus — and with what effect? 

Was it in such hours that he learnt his deepest lessons 

rom the birds and the lilies of the field? Why not? 

s he sat out in the wild under the open sky, did the 
stars never speak to him, as to Hebrew psalmist and 
Roman Virgil? 

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, 
The moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; 
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? 
And the son of man, that thou visitest him? 

(Psalm viii. 3, 4.) 

t is a question men have to meet and face; and if 
we can trust Matthew's statement, an utterance of 
his in later years called out by the sneer of a Pharisee, 
shows how he had made the old poet's answer his 

wn — 

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected 
praise (Matt. xxi. 16). 

If this were a solitary utterance of his thought upon 
Nature, it might be ranked with one or two pointed 






34 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

citations he made of the letter of the Old Testament; 
but it is safe, perhaps, to take it as one of many indica- 
tions of his communion with God in Nature. The 
wind blowing in the night where it listed — must we 
authenticate every verse of the Fourth Gospel before 
we believe that he listened to it also and caught some- 
thing? At any rate, in later years, when his friends 
are over-driven and weary, quiet and open-air in a desert 
place are what he prescribes for them and wishes to 
share with them — surely a hint of old experience (Mark 
vi. 31). 

But now let us turn back to Nazareth, for, as the 
Gospel reminds us, there he grew up. "The city 
teaches the man," said the old Greek poet Simonides; 
and it does, as we see, and more than we sometimes 
realize. Jesus grew up in an Oriental town, in the 
middle of its life — a town with poor houses, bad smells, 
and w r orse stories, tragedies of widow and prodigal 
son, of unjust judge and grasping publican — yes, 
and comedies too. We know at once from general 
knowledge of Jewish life and custom, and from the 
recorded fact that he read the Scriptures, that he 
went to school; and we could guess, fairly safely, that 
he played with his school-fellows, even if he had not 
told us what the games were at which they played — 

At weddings and at funerals, 
As if his life's vocation 
Were endless imitation. 

Sometimes the children were sulky and would not play 
(Luke vii. 32). How strange, and how delightful, that 
the great Gospel, full of God's word for mankind, should 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 85 

have a little corner in it for such reminiscences of 
children's games! We cannot suppose that he had 
access to many books, but he knew the Old Testament 
well and familiarly — better and more aptly than some 
people expected. Traces of other books have been 
found in his teaching, not many and some of them doubt- 
ful. Generally one would conclude that, apart from the 
Old Testament, his education was not very bookish — 
he found it in home and shop, in the desert, on the road, 
and in the market-place. 

It is interesting to gather from the Gospel what Jesus 
says of the talk of men, and it is surprising to find 
how much it is, till we realize how very much in 
ancient times the city was the education, and the 
market-place the school, where some of the most 
abiding lessons were learnt. Is it not so still in the 
East? Here was a boy, however, who watched men 
and their words more closely than they guessed, on 
whose ears words fell, not as old coinages, but as new 
minting, with the marks of thought still rough and bright 
on them — indexes to the speaker. 

Proverbs of the market every people has of its own. 

"It is nought, it is nought, saith the buyer, but, after 
he is gone his way, then he boasteth. 53 And the seller 
has all the variants of caveat emptor ready to retort. 
In antiquity, and in the East to-day, apart from 
machine-made things, we find the same uncertainty 
in most transactions as to the value of the article, the 
same eagerness of both seller and buyer to get at the 
supposed special knowledge of the other, and the same 
preliminary skirmish of proposal, protest, offer, re- 
fusal, and oath. Jesus stands by the stall, watch- 




36 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

ing some small sale with the bright, earnest eyes which 
we find so often in the Gospels. The buyer swears 
"on his head" that he will not give more than so much; 
then, "by the altar" he won't get the thing. "By the 
earth" it isn't worth it; "by the heaven" the seller 
gave that for it. So the battle rages, and at last the 
bargain is struck. The buyer raises his price; the seller 
takes less than he gave for the thing; neither has be- 
lieved the other, but each, as the keen eyes of the on- 
looker see, feels he has over-reached the other. Heaven 
has been invoked — and what is Heaven? As the 
words fell on the listener's ears, he saw the throne oJ 
God, and on it One before whose face Heaven itseU 
and earth will flee away — and be brought back again 
for judgment. And by Heaven, and by Him who sits 
on the Throne, men will swear falsely for an anna oi 
two. How can they? It is because "nothings grow 
something"; the words make a mist about the thing. 
In later days Jesus told his followers to swear not at 
all — to stick to Yes and No. 

Then a leader in the religious world passes, and the 
loiterers have a new interest for the moment. "Rabbi, 
Rabbi," they say, and the great man moves onward, 
obviously pleased with the greeting in the market- 
place (Matt, xxiii. 7). As soon as he is out of hearing, 
it is no longer "Rabbi" he is called; talk turns to 
another tune. How little the fine word meant! How 
lightly the title was given! Worse still, the title will 
stand between a man and the facts of life. Some will 
use it to deceive him; others, impressed by it, are 
silent in his presence; one way and another, the facts 
are kept from him. Seeing, he sees not, and he comes 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 37 

to live in an unreal world. How many men to-day 
will say what they really think before a man in cleri- 
cal dress, or a dignitary however trivial? "Be not 
ye called 'Rabbi,' " was the counsel Jesus gave to 
his followers, and he would accept neither "Rabbi," 
nor "Good Master," nor any other title till he saw 
how much it meant. "Master!" they said, "we 
know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God 
in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou re- 
gardest not the person of men" (Matt. xxii. 16). But 
as the evangelist continues, Jesus "perceived their 
wickedness" — he had heard such things before and 
was not trapped. "Hosanna in the highest!" (Mark 
xi. 10) — strange to think of the quiet figure, riding 
in the midst of the excited crowd, open-eyed and 
undeceived in his hour of "triumph" — as little per- 
turbed, too, when his name is cast out as eviL How 
little men's praise and their blame matter, when your 
eyes are fixed on God — when you have Him and His 
facts to be your inspiration! On the other hand, when 
you have not contact with God, how much men's 
talk counts, and how easy it is to lose all sense 
of fact! 

By the by the talk veers round to what Pilate had 
done to the Galileans — if the dates fit, or if for the 
moment we can make them fit, or anticipate once for 
all, and be done with the bazar talk which never stopped. 
Pilate had killed the Galileans when they went up 
to Jerusalem — yes ! mingled their own blood, you 
might say, with the blood of their sacrifices (Luke 
xiii. 1). What would he do next? There was no 
telling. What was needed — some time it was 



38 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

bound to come — and the voice sank — a Theudas, 
or a Judas again (Acts v. 36, 37) — it would not be 
surprising. . . . There were no newspapers, no 
approved and reliable sources of news such as we boast 
to have from our governments and millionaires; all 
was rumor, bazar talk — "Lo! here!" and "Lo! there!" 
(Mark xiii. 21). Prohibiti sermones ideoque plures, 
said Tacitus of Rome — rumors were forbidden, so 
there were more of them. The Messiah must come 
some time, said one man who might be a friend of the 
Zealots. In any case, reflected another, those Gali- 
leans had probably angered Heaven and got their 
deserts; ill luck like that could hardly come by 
accident; think of the tower that fell at Siloam 
— anybody could see there was a judgment in it. 
Might it not be said that God had discredited John 
the Baptist, now his head was taken off? So men 
speculated (cf. John ix. 2). Jesus saw through all this, 
and was radiantly clear about it. 

So they chattered, and he heard. Then the talk 
took another turn, and tales were told — bad eyes flashed 
and lips smacked, as one story-teller eclipsed the other 
in the familiar vein. The Arabian Nights are tales 
of the crowd, it is said, rather than literature in their 
origin, and will give clues enough to what might be 
told. Jesus heard, and he saw what it meant; and 
afterwards he told his friends: "From within, out of the 
heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornica- 
tions, murders . . . foolishness; all these evil things come 
from within, and defile the man" (Mark vii. 21-23). 
The evil thought takes shape to find utterance, and 
gains thereby a new vitality, a new power for evil, and 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 39 

may haunt both speaker and listener for ever with its 
defiling memory. 

By and by he intervened and spoke himself. 
Every one was shocked, and said, "Blasphemy!" They 
were not used to think of God as he did, and it seemed 
improper. 

Then the whole question of human speech rises 
for him. What did they mean by their words? 
What could their minds be like? God dragged in 
and flung about like a counter, in a game of barter — 
but if you speak real meaning about God it is blas- 
phemy. "Rabbi, Rabbi" to the great man's face — 
he turns his back — and his name is smirched for ever 
by a witty improvisation. Why? Why should men 
do such things? The magic in the idle tale — ten 
minutes, and the memory is stained for ever with 
what not one of them would forget, however he 
might wish to try to forget. The words are loose 
and idle, careless, flung out without purpose but to 
pass the moment — and they live for ever and work 
mischief. How can they be so light and yet have such 
power? 

Later on he told his friends what he had seen in 
this matter of words. They come from within, and 
the speaker's whole personality, false or true, is behind 
what he says — the good or bad treasure of his heart. 
There are no grapes growing on the bramble bush. No 
wonder that of every idle word men shall give account 
on the day of Judgment (Matt. xii. 36). The idle 
word — the word unstudied — comes straight from the 
inmost man, the spontaneous overflow from the spirit 
within, natural and inevitable, proof of his quality; 



40 



THE JESUS OF HISTORY 



and they react with the life that brought them 
forth. 1 

So he grows up — in a real world and among real people. 
He goes to school with the boys of his own age, and 
lives at home with mother and brothers and sisters. 
He reads the Old Testament, and forms a habit of 
going to the Synagogue (Luke iv. 16). All points to 
a home where religion was real. The first word he 
learnt to say was probably Abba, and it struck the 
keynote of his thoughts. But he knew the world with- 
out as well — turned on to it early the keen eyes that 
saw all, and he recognized what he saw. Knowledge of 
men, but without cynicism, a loving heart still in spite 
of his freedom from illusions — these are among the 
gifts that his environment gave him, or failed to take 
away from him. 

1 See further, on this, in Chapter VII. 







CHAPTER III 

THE MAN AND HIS MIND 

It is a commonplace with those who take literature 
seriously that what is to reach the heart must come 
from the heart; and the maxim may be applied con- 
versely — that what has reached a heart has come from 
a heart — that what continues to reach the heart, 
among strange peoples, in distant lands, after long 
ages, has come from a heart of no common make. 
The Anglo-Saxon boy is at home in the Odyssey, and 
when he is a man — if he has the luck to be guided into 
classical paths — he finds himself in the Mneid\ and from 
this certain things are deduced about the makers of 
those poems — that they knew life, looked on it with 
bright, keen eyes, loved it, and lived it over again as 
they shaped it into verse. 

When we turn to the first three Gospels, we find 
the same thing. Here are books with a more world- 
wide range than Homer or Virgil, translated again and 
again from the first century of their existence on to 
the latest — and then more than ever — into all sorts 
of tongues, to reach men all over the globe; and that 
purpose they have achieved. They have done it not 
so much for the literary graces of the translators or 
even of the original authors, though in one case these 
are more considerable than is sometimes allowed. That 
the Gospels owe their appeal to the recorded sayings 

41 




42 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

and doings of our Lord, is our natural way of putting 
it to-day; but if for "our Lord" we put a plainer de- 
scription, more congenial to the day in which the 
Gospels were written, we shall be in a better position 
to realize the significance of the world-wide appeal 
of his words. Thus and thus, then, spoke a mere pro- 
vincial, a Jew who, though far less conspicuous and 
interesting, came from the region of Meleager and 
Philodemos — not from their town of Gadara, nor possibly 
from their district, but from some place not so very far 
away. 

It was not to be expected that he should win the 
hearts of men as he did. He had not the Greek cul- 
ture of the two Gadarenes. Celsus even found 
his style of speech rather vulgar. But he has, as a 
matter of common knowledge — so common as hardly 
to be noted — won the hearts of men in every race and 
every land. The fact is familiar, but we have as 
historians and critics to look for the explanation. 
What has been his appeal? And what the heart and 
nature, from which came this incredible power and 
reach of appeal? "Out of th& abundance (the over- 
flow) of the heart the mouth speaketh," he said 
(Matt. xii. 34). This he amplified, as we have seen, 
by his insistence on the weight of every idle word (Matt, 
xii. 36) — the unstudied and spontaneous expression 
or ejaculation — the reflex, in modern phrase — which 
gives the real clue to the man's inner nature and 
deeper mind, which "justifies" him, therefore, or "con- 
demns" him (Matt. xii. 37). The overflow of 
the heart, he holds, shows more decisively than 
anything else the quality of the spring in its depths. 



THE MAN AND HIS MIND 43 

Here is a suggestion which we find true in ordinary 
life as well as in the study of literature. If we turn 
it back upon its author, he at least will not complain, 
and we shall perhaps gain a new sense of his signifi- 
cance by approaching him at a new angle, from an 
outlook not perhaps much frequented. How did he 
come to speak in this manner, to say this and that? 
To what feeling or thought, to what attitude to life, 
is this or the other saying due? If he, too, spoke "out 
of the overflow of his heart" — and we can believe it 
when we think of the freshness and spontaneity with 
which he spoke — of what nature and of what depth was 
that heart? 

We can very well believe that much in his speech that 
was unforgettable to others, he forgot himself. They 
remembered, they could not help remembering, 
what he said; but he — no! he said it and moved on, 
keeping no register of his sayings; and so much the 
more natural and characteristic they are. Nor 
would he, like smaller people, be very careful of the 
form and turn of his speech; it was never set. Cer- 
tainly he gave his followers the rule not to study their 
language (Mark xiii. 11). Whether or no he had con- 
sciously thought it all out, we can see the value of 
his rule, and how it fits in with his way of life and 
safeguards it. Under such a rule speech will not be 
stereotyped; no set form of words will impose itself 
on the free movement of thought, the mind can 
and will move of itself unhampered; and when the mind 
keeps and develops such freedom of movement, it 
commonly breaks new ground and handles new 
things. Not to be careful of our speech means 



44 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

for most of us slovenly thinking; but when a man 
thinks in earnest and takes truth seriously, when he 
speaks with his eye on his object, his language will 
not be slovenly, his instinct for fact will keep his speech 
pure and true. This is what we find in the sayings 
of Jesus; there is form, but living form, the freedom 
and grace which the clear mind and the friendly 
eye communicate insensibly and inimitably to lan- 
guage. 

Our task in this chapter is primarily a historical 
one. From the words of Jesus we have to work back 
to the type of mind from which they come. There 
is always danger in such a task. We may forget the 
wide and living variety of the mind we study; our 
own minds may not be large enough, nor tender enough, 
not various, quick and sympathetic in such a 
degree as to apprehend what we find, to see what it 
means, and to relate it to itself, detail to whole. How 
much greater the danger here! While we analyze, 
we have to remember that the most correct analysis 
of features or characteristics may easily fail to give 
us a true idea of the face or the character which we 
analyze. The whole is more than the sum of its 
parts. The face and the character have an "integrity," 
a wholeness. The detail may be of immense 
value to us, studied as detail; but for the true view 
the detail, familiar as it may be to us, and dear to 
us, must be sunk in the general view. Especially is 
this true of great characters. The "reconstruction 
of a personality' ' — to borrow a phrase from some psy- 
chologists — is a very difficult matter, even when we 
are masters of our detail, There is a proportion, a 



I 



THE MAN AND HIS MIND 45 

perspective, a balance, a poise about a character — 
my terms may involve some mixture of metaphors, 
but if the mixture brings out the complexity and difficulty 
of our task, it will be justified. Above all there is life, 
and as a life deepens and widens, it grows com- 
plex, unintelligible, and wonderful. It is more so than 
ever in the case of Jesus. Yet we have to grapple with 
this great task, if we are to know him, even if here as 
elsewhere we realize quickly that the beginning of 
real knowledge is when we grasp how much we 
do not know, how much there is to know. Attempted 
in this spirit, a study of the mind of Jesus and his char- 
acteristics should help us forward to some further inti- 
macy with him. 

The Gospels do not, like some biographies ancient 
and modern, give a place to the physical character- 
istics of Jesus. Suetonius in a very short sketch adds 
the personal aspect of the poet Horace, who, it is true, 
had led the way by such allusions (Epist. i. 4, 15-16), 
and tells us how Augustus said he was "a squat little 
pot" (sessilis obba). The Acts of Thekla in a similar 
way describe St. Paul's short figure with its suggestion 
of quickness. But the only personal traits of this sort 
that I recall in the New Testament are the eyes of Jesus 
and Paul's way of stretching out a hand when he spoke. 
In view of this reticence, it is rather remarkable how 
often the Gospels refer to Jesus "looking." He 'looked 
round about on" the people in the Synagogue, 
and then — with some suggestion of a pause and 
silence while he looked, "he saith unto the man" (Mark 
iii. 5). When Peter deprecated the Cross, we find the 
same; "when he had turned about and looked on his 



46 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

disciples, he rebuked Peter" (Mark viii. 33). When 
the rich young ruler came so impulsively to him to ask 
him about eternal life, Jesus, "looking upon him, loved 
him" — and we touch there a certain reminiscence of 
eye-witnesses (Mark x. 21). There are other references 
of the same kind in the narratives — the look seems 
to come into the story naturally, without the writers 
noticing it. There must have been much else as 
familiar to his friends and companions. They must 
have known him as we know our friends — the inflec- 
tions of his voice, his characteristic movements, 
the hang of his clothes, his step in the dark, and all 
such things. Did he speak quickly or slowly? 
or move his hand when he spoke? The teaching 
posture of Buddha's hand is stereotyped in his images. 
We are not told such things about Jesus, and guessing 
does not take us very far. Yet a stanza in one of the 
elegies written on the death of Sir Philip Sidney 
may be taken as a far-away likeness of a greater and 
more wonderful figure — and not lead us very far 
astray — 

A sweet, attractive kind of grace; 

The full assurance given by looks; 
Perpetual comfort in a face; 

The lineaments of Gospel books. 

If we are not explicitly told of such things by the 
evangelists, they are easily felt in the story. The 
"paradoxes," as we call them — a rather dull name for 
them — surely point to a face alive with intellect and 
gaiety. The way in which, for instance, the leper 
approaches him, implies the man's eyes fixed in close 
study on Jesus' face, and finding nothing there to check 



THE MAN AND HIS MIND 47 

him and everything to bring him nearer (Mark i. 41). 
When Mark tells us that he greeted the Syro-Phcenician 
woman's sally about the little dogs eating the children's 
crumbs under the table with the reply, "For the sake 
of this saying of yours . . . / we must assume some 
change of expression on such a face as that of Jesus 
(Mark vii. 29). 

We read again and again of the interest men and 
women found in his preaching and teaching — how 
they hung on him to hear him, how they came 
in crowds, how on one occasion they drove him 
into a boat for a pulpit. It is only familiarity that 
has blinded us to the "charm" they found in his speech 
— "they marveled at his words of charm" (Luke iv. 
22) — to the gaiety and playfulness that light up his 
lessons. For instance, there is a little-noticed phrase, 
that grows very delightful as we study it, in his words 
to the seventy disciples — "Into whatsoever house ye 
enter, first say, Peace to this house (the common salaam 
of the East); and if a son of peace be there, your peace 
shall rest upon it; if not, your salaam will come back 
to you 9 ' (Luke x. 6). "A son of peace"— not the son 
of peace — what a beautiful expression; what a beautiful 
idea, too, that the unheeded Peace! comes back and 
blesses the heart that wished it, as if courteous and 
kind words never went unrewarded! Think again 
of "Solomon in all his glory" (Matt. vi. 29) — before 
the phrase was hackneyed by common quotation. Do 
not such words reveal nature? 

A more elaborate and more amusing episode is that 
of the Pharisee's drinking operations. We are shown 
the man polishing his cup, elaborately and carefully; 



48 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

for he lays great importance on the cleanness of his 
cup; but he forgets to clean the inside. Most people 
drink from the inside, but the Pharisee forgot it, dirty 
as it was, and left it untouched. Then he sets about 
straining what he is going to drink — another elaborate 
process; he holds a piece of muslin over the cup and 
pours with care; he pauses — he sees a mosquito; he 
has caught it in time and flicks it away; he is safe and 
he will not swallow it. And then, adds Jesus, he swal- 
lowed a camel. How many of us have ever pictured 
the process, and the series of sensations, as the long 
hairy neck slid down the throat of the Pharisee — all 
that amplitude of loose-hung anatomy — the hump — - 
two humps — both of them slid down — and he never 
noticed — and the legs — all of them — with whole outfit 
of knees and big padded feet. The Pharisee swallowed 
a camel — and never noticed it (Matt, xxiii. 24, 25). 
It is the mixture of sheer realism with absurdity 
that makes the irony and gives it its force. Did 
no one smile as the story was told? Did no 
one see the scene pictured with his own mind's 
eye — no one grasp the humor and the irony 
with delight? Could any one, on the other hand, 
forget it? A modern teacher would have said, 
in our jargon, that the Pharisee had no sense of pro- 
portion — and no one would have thought the remark 
worth remembering. But Jesus' treatment of the subject 
reveals his own mind in quite a number of aspects. 

When he bade turn the other cheek — that sentence 
which Celsus found so vulgar — did no one smile, then, 
at the idea of anybody ever dreaming of such an act 
(Matt. v. 39)? Nor at the picture of the kind brother 






THE MAN AND HIS MIND 49 

taking a mote from his brother's eye, with a whole 
balk of timber in his own (Matt. vii. 5)? Nor at the 
suggestion of doing two miles of forced labor when 
only one was demanded (Matt. v. 41)? Nor when he 
suggested that anxiety about food and clothing was 
a mark of the Gentiles (Matt. vi. 32)? Did none of 
his disciples mark a touch of irony when he said that 
among the Gentile dynasties the kings who exercise 
authority are called "Benefactors" (Luke xxii. 25)? 
It was true; Euergetes is a well-known kingly title, 
but the explanation that it was the reward for strenuous 
use of monarchic authority was new. Are we to think 
his face gave no sign of what he was doing? Was there 
no smile? 

We are told by his biographer that Marcus Aurelius 
had a face that never changed — for joy or sorrow, "being 
an adherent,' 3 he adds, "of the Stoic philosophy." The 
pose of superiority to emotion was not uncommonly 
held in those times to be the mark of a sage — Horace's 
nil admirari. The writers of the Gospels do not conceal 
that Jesus had feelings, and expressed them. We read 
how he "rejoiced in spirit" (Luke x. 21) — how he 
"sighed" (Mark vii. 34) and "sighed deeply" (Mark 
viii. 12) — how his look showed "anger" (Mark iii. 5). 
They tell us of his indignant utterances (Matt, xxiii. 
14; Mark xi. 17) — of his quick sensitiveness to a purposeful 
touch (Mark v. 30) — of his fatigue (Mark vii. 24; Luke 
viii. 23) — of his instant response, as we have just seen, 
to contact with such interesting spirits as the Syro- 
Phcenician woman and the rich young ruler. Above 
all, we find him again and again "moved with com- 
passion." We saw the leper approach him, with 



50 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

eyes fixed on the face of Jesus. The man's appeal — 
"If thou wilt thou canst make me clean" — his misery 
moves Jesus; he reaches out his hand, and, with no 
thought for contagion or danger, he touches the leper 
— so deep was the wave of pity that swept through 
him — and he heals the man (Mark i. 40-42). It would 
almost seem as if the touching impressed the spectators 
as much as the healing. Compassion is an old- 
fashioned word, and sympathy has a wide range of 
suggestions, some of them by now a little cold; we 
have to realize, if we can, how deeply and genuinely 
Jesus felt with men, how keen his feeling was for their 
suffering and for their hunger, and at the same mo- 
ment reflect how strong and solid a nature it is that 
is so profoundly moved. Again, when we read of 
his happy way in dealing with children, are we to 
draw no inference as to his face, and what it told the 
children? Finally, on this part of our subject, 
we are given glimpses of his dark hours. The writer 
to the Hebrews speaks of his "offering up prayers and 
supplications with strong crying and tears" and "learning 
obedience by the things that he suffered" (Heb. 
v. 7, 8), and Luke, perhaps dealing with the same 
occasion, says he was "in agony" (Luke xxii. 44), 
a strong phrase from a man of medical training. 
Luke again, with the other evangelists, refers to the 
temptations of Jesus, and in a later passage records the 
poignant and revealing sentence — "Ye are they that have 
continued with me in my temptations" (Luke xxii. 28). 
Finally, there is the last cry upon the Cross (Mark xv. 
37). So frankly, and yet so unobtrusively, they lay bare 
his soul, as far as they saw it. 



THE MAN AND HIS MIND 51 

From what is given us it is possible to go further and 
see something of his habits of mind. His thought will 
occupy us in later chapters; here we are concerned rather 
with the way in which his mind moves, and the charac- 
teristics of his thinking. 

First of all, we note a certain swiftness, a quick reali- 
zation of a situation, a character, or the meaning of a 
word. Men try to trap him with a question, and he 
instantly "recognizes their trickery" (Luke xx. 23). 
When they ask for a sign, he is as quick to see what 
they have in mind (Mark viii. 11-13). He catches the 
word whispered to Jairus — half hears, half divines it, in 
an instant (Mark v. 36). He is surprised at slowness of 
mind in other men (Matt. xv. 16; Mark viii. 21). And 
in other things he is as quick — he sees "the kingdoms of 
the world in a moment of time" (Luke iv. 5); he beholds 
"Satan fallen (aorist participle) from heaven like light- 
ning" (Luke x. 18) — two very striking passages, which 
illuminate his mind for us in a very important phase of 
it. We ought to have been able to guess without them 
that he saw things instantly and in a flash — that they 
stood out for him in outline and color and movement 
there and then. That is plain in the parables from 
nature, and here it is confirmed. Is there in all his 
parables a blurred picture, the edges dim or the focus 
wrong? The tone of the parables is due largely to this 
gift of visualizing, to use an ugly modern word, and of 
doing it with swiftness and precision. 

Several things combine to make this faculty, or at 
least go along with it — a combination not very common 
even among men of genius — an unusual sense of fact, a 
very keen and vivid sympathy, and a gift of bringing 



52 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

imagination to bear on the fact in the moment of its 
discovery, and afterwards in his treatment of the fact. 

On his sense of fact we have touched before, in deal- 
ing with his close observation of Nature. It is an obser- 
vation that needs no note-book, that is hardly conscious 
of itself. There is, as we know, a happy type of person 
who sees almost without looking, certainly without no- 
ticing — and sees aright too. The temperament is described 
by Wordsworth in the opening books of The Prelude. The 
poet type seems to lose so much and yet constantly sur- 
prises us by what it has captured, and sometimes hardly 
itself realizes how much has been done. The gains are 
not registered, but they are real and they are never lost, 
and come flashing out all unexpectedly when the note is 
struck that calls them. So one feels it was with Jesus' 
intimate knowledge of Nature — it is not the knowledge of 
botanist or naturalist, but that of the inmate and the 
companion, who by long intimacy comes to know far 
more than he dreams. "Wise master mariners," wrote 
the Greek poet, Pindar, long before, "know the wind that 
shall blow on the third day, and are not wrecked for 
headlong greed of gain." They know the weather, as 
we say, by instinct; and instinct is the outcome of in- 
timacy, of observation accurate but sub-conscious. 

It chimes in with this instinct for fact, that Jesus 
should lay so much emphasis on truth of word and truth 
of thought. Any hypocrisy is a leaven (Matt. xvi. 12; 
Luke xii. 1) ; any system of two standards of truth spoils 
the mind (Matt. v. 33-37). The divided mind fails be- I 
cause it is not for one thing or the other. If it is im- 
possible to serve God and mammon, truth and God go ] 
together in one allegiance; and a non-Theocentric ele- I 



THE MAN AND HIS MIND 53 

merit in a man's thought will be fatal sooner or later to 
any aptitude he has by nature for God and truth. 

We find this illustrated in Jesus' own case. At the 
heart of his instinct for fact is his instinct for God. He 
goes to the permanent and eternal at once in his quest 
of fact, because his instinct for God is so sure and so 
compelling. Bishop Phillips Brooks noted in Jesus' con- 
versation "a constant progress from the arbitrary and 
special to the essential and universal forms of thought," 
"a true freedom from fastidiousness," "a singular large- 
ness" in his intellectual life. The small question is an- 
swered in the larger — "the life is more than meat and the 
body is more than raiment" (Luke xii. 23). When he is 
challenged on divorce, he goes past Moses to God (Matt. 
xix, 4) — "He which made them at the beginning made 
them male and female.' 2 Every question is settled for 
him by reference to God, and to God's principles of 
action and to God's laws and commands; and God, as we 
shall see in a later chapter, is not for him a conception 
borrowed from others, a quotation from a book. God is 
real, living, and personal; and all his teaching is directed 
to drive his disciples into the real; he insists on the open 
mind, the study of fact, the fresh, keen eye turned on 
the actual doings of God. 

When life and thought have such a center, a sim- 
plicity and an integrity follow beyond what we might 
readily guess. "When thine eye is single, thy whole 
body also is full of light, ... if thy whole body there- 
fore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall 
be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle 
doth give thee light" (Luke xi. 34-36). It is this fulness 
of light that we find in Jesus; and as the light plays on 



54 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

one object and another, how clear and simple everything 
grows! All round about him was subtlety, cleverness, 
fastidiousness. His speech is lucid, drives straight to the 
center, to the principle, and is intelligible. We may not 
see how far his word carries us, but it is abundantly plain 
that simple and straightforward people do understand 
Jesus — not all at once, but sufficiently for the moment, 
and with a sense that there is more beyond. His thought 
is uncomplicated by distinctions due to tradition and its 
accidents. His whole attitude to life is simple — he has no 
taboos; he comes "eating and drinking" (Matt. xi. 19); 
and he told his followers, when he sent them out to 
preach, to eat what they were given (Luke x. 7); "give 
alms,' 5 he says, "of such things as ye have; and, behold, 
all things are clean unto you" (Luke xi. 41). If God 
gives the food, it will probably be clean; and the old 
taboos will be mere tradition of men. He is not inter- 
ested in what men call "signs," in the exceptional thing; 
the ordinary suffices when one sees God in it. One of 
Jesus' great lessons is to get men to look for God in the 
commonplace things of which God makes so many, as if 
Abraham Lincoln were right and God did make so many 
common people, because he likes them best. The com- 
monest flowers — God thinks them out, says Jesus, and 
takes care of them (Matt. vi. 28-30). Hence there is 
little need of special machinery for contact with God — 
priesthoods, trances, visions, or mystical states — abnor- 
mal means for contact with the normal. When Jesus 
speaks of the very highest and holiest things, he is as 
simple and natural as when he is making a table in the 
carpenter-shop. Sense and sanity are the marks of his 
religion. 



THE MAN AND HIS MIND 55 

Sense of fact" is a phrase which does not exclude- 



perhaps it even suggests — some hint of dulness. The 
matter-of-fact people are valuable in their way, but 
rarely illuminative, and it is because they lack the imagi- 
nation that means sympathy. Now in Jesus' case there 
is a quickness and vividness of sympathy — he likes the 
birds and flowers and beasts he uses as illustrations. 
They are not the "natural objects" with which dull peo- 
ple try to brighten their pages and discourses. They are 
happy living things that come to his mind, as it were, of 
themselves, because, shall we say? they know they will 
be welcome there; and they are welcome. His pity and 
sympathy are unlike ours in having so much more intel- 
ligence and fellow-feeling in them. He understands men 
and women, as his gift of bright and winning speech 
shows. After all, as Carlyle has pointed out in many 
places, it is this gift of tenderness and understanding, 
of sympathy, that gives the measure of our intellects. 1 
It is the faculty by which men touch fact and master it. 
It is the want of it that makes so many clever and in- 
genious people so futile and distressing. 

The sense of fact and the gift for sympathy are the 
foundations, &$ to speak, of the imagination which gives 
their quality to the stories and pictures of Jesus. He 
thinks in pictures, as it were; they fill his speech, and 
every one of them is alive and real. Think, for example, 
of the Light of the world (Matt. v. 14), the strait gate and 
the narrow way (Matt. vii. 14), the pictures of the bride- 

1 E.g. in his essay on Mirabeau: " The real quantity of our 
insight . . . depends on our patience, our fairness, lovingness " ; 
and in Biography: " A loving heart is the beginning of all 
knowledge." 



56 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

groom (Mark ii. 19), sower (Matt. xiii. 3), pearl merchant 
(Matt. xiii. 45), and the men with the net (Matt. xiii. 47), 
the sheep among the wolves (Matt. x. 16), the woman 
sweeping the house (Luke xv. 8), the debtor going to 
prison accompanied by his creditor and the officer with 
the judge's warrant (Luke xii. 58), the shepherd separat- 
ing his sheep from the goats (Matt. xxv. 32), the children 
playing in the market-place pretending to pipe or to 
mourn (Luke vii. 32), the fall of the house (Matt. vii. 
27) — or the ironical pictures of the blind leading the 
blind straight for the ditch (Matt. xv. 14), the vintagers 
taking their baskets to the bramble bushes (Matt. vii. 
16), the candle burning away brightly under the bushel 
(Matt. v. 15; Luke xi. 33), the offering of pearls to the 
pigs (Matt. vii. 6) — or his descriptions of what lay before 
himself as a cup and a baptism (Mark x. 38), and of his 
task as the setting fire to the world (Luke xii. 49). There 
is a truthfulness and a living energy about all these pic- 
tures — not least about those touched with irony. 

There are, however, pictures less realistic and more 
imaginative — one or two of them, in the language of the 
fireside, quite "creepy." Here is a house — a neat, trim 
little house — and for the English reader there is of course 
a garden or a field round it, and a wood beyond. Out of 
the wood comes something — stealthily creeping up towards 
the house — something not easy to make out, but weary 
and travel-stained and dusty — and evil. A strange feel- 
ing comes over one as one watches — it is evil, one is cer- 
tain of it. Nearer and nearer to the house it creeps — it is 
by the window — it rises to look in, and one shudders to 
think of those inside who suddenly see that looking at 
them through the window. But there is no one there. 



THE MAN AND HIS MIND 57 

• 

Fatigue changes to triumph; caution is dropped; it goes 
and returns with seven worse than itself, and the last 
state of the place is worse than the first (Luke xi. 24-26). 
Is this leaving the real? One critic will say it is. "No," 
says another man, in a graver tone and speaking slowly, 
"it's real enough; it's my story." But have we left the 
text too far? Then let us try another passage. Here is a 
funeral procession, a bier with a dead man laid out on it, 
"wrapped in a linen cloth" (Matt, xxvii. 59), "bound hand 
and foot with grave-clothes" (John xi. 44) — a common 
enough sight in the East; but who are they who are 
carrying him — those silent, awful figures, bound like him 
hand and foot, and wound with the same linen cloth, 
moving swiftly and steadily along with their burden? It 
is the dead burying the dead (Luke ix. 60). Add to these 
the account of the three Temptations — stories in picture, 
which must come from Jesus himself, and illustrate 
another side of his experience. For to the mind that 
sees and thinks in pictures, temptation comes in pictures 
which the mind makes for itself, or has presented to.it 
and at once lights up — pictures horrible and once seen 
hard to forget and to escape. No wonder he warns men 
against the pictures they paint themselves in their minds 
(Matt. v. 28; cf. Chapter VII., p. 154). Add also the 
other pictures of Satan fallen (Luke x. 18) and Satan 
pushing into God's presence with a demand for the 
disciples (Luke xxii. 31). Are we to call these "visions" 
— the word is ambiguous — or are they imaginative pre- 
sentments of evil, as it thrusts itself on the soul, with all 
its allurements and all its ugliness? "Visions/ 3 in the 
sense that is associated with trance, we shall hardly call 
them. They are pictures showing his gift. 



58 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

Lastly, on this part of our subject, let us remind our- 
selves of the many parables and pictures and sayings 
which put God himself before us. Here is the bird's 
nest, and one little sparrow fallen to the ground — and 
God is there and he takes notice of it; he misses the little 
bird from the brood (Matt. x. 29; cf. Luke xii. 6). Here 
again is quite another scene — the rich and middle-aged 
man, who has prospered in everything and is just com- 
pleting his plans to retire from business, when he feels a 
tap on his shoulder and hears a voice speaking to him, 
and he turns and is face to face with God (Luke xii. 20). 
And there are all the other stories of God's goodness and 
kindness and care; is not the very phrase "Our Father in 
heaven" a picture in itself, if we can manage to give the 
word the value which Jesus meant it to carry? When 
one studies the teaching of Jesus, and concentrates on 
what he draws us of God, God somehow becomes real and 
delightful, in a most wonderful way. 

With all these faculties brought to bear on all he 
thinks, and lucent in all h^ says, there is little wonder 
that men recognized another note in Jesus from that 
familiar in their usual teachers. Rabbi Eliezer of those 
times was praised as "a well trough that loses not a drop 
of water." We all know that type of teacher — the tank- 
mind, full, no doubt, supplied by pipes, and ministering 
its gifts by pipe and tap, regulated, tiresome, and dead. 
'The water that I shall give him," says Jesus in the 
Fourth Gospel (John iv. 14), "shall be in him a well of 
water springing up into everlasting life." The water 
metaphors of the New Testament are not of trough and 
tank. Jesus taught men — not from a reservoir of quota- 
tions, like a scribe or a Rabbi, "but as possessed of au- 



THE MAN AND HIS MIND 59 

thority himself" (Matt. vii. 29). Who gave him that 
authority? asked the priests (Matt. xxi. 23)? Who 
authorizes the living man to live? 'All things are de- 
livered unto me of my Father" (Matt. xi. 27). "My 
words shall not pass away" (Mark xiii. 31). 

He has proved right; his words have not passed away. 
The great "Son of Fact," he went to fact, drove his dis- 
ciples to fact, and (in the striking phrase of Cromwell) 
"spoke things.'' And we can see in the record again and 
again the traces of the mental habits and the natural 
language of one who habitually based himself on experience 
and on fact. Critics remark on his method of using the 
Old Testament, and contrast it with contemporary ways. 
St. Paul, for instance, in the passage where he weighs the 
readings "seeds" and "seed" (Gal. iii. 16), is plainly 
racking language to the destruction of its real sense; 
no one ever would have written "seeds" in that con- 
nection; but in the style of the day he forces a singular 
into an utterly non-natural significance. St. Matthew in 
his first two chapters proves the events, which he de- 
scribes, to have been prophesied by citing Old Testament 
passages — two of which conspicuously refer to entirely 
different matters, and do not mean at all what he sug- 
gests (Matt. ii. 15, 23). The Hebrew with the Old 
Testament, like the Greek of those days with Homer, 
made what play he pleased; if the words fitted his fancy, 
he took them regardless of connection or real meaning; 
if he was pressed for a defence, he would take refuge in 
allegory. A fashion was set for the Church which bore 
bad fruit. The Old Testament was emptied of meaning 
to fortify the Christian faith with "proof texts." When 

esus quotes the Old Testament, it is for other ends and 




60 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

with a clear, incisive sense of the prophet's meaning. 
"Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy 
and not sacrifice" (Matt. ix. 13 and xii. 7, quoting Hosea 
vi. 6). He not merely quotes Hosea, but it is plain that 
he has got at the very heart of the man and his message. 
Similarly when he reads Isaiah in the Synagogue at 
Nazareth (Luke iv. 17), he lays hold of a great passage 
and brings out with emphasis its value and its promise. 
He touches the real, and no lapse of time makes his quo- 
tations look odd or quaint. When he is asked which is 
the first commandment of all, he at once, with what a 
modern writer calls "a brilliant flash of the highest 
genius," links a text in Deuteronomy with one in Le- 
viticus — "Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord, 
and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, 
and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all 
thy strength" (Deut. vi. 4-5), and, he adds, "the second is 
like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy- 
self. There is none other commandment greater than 
these" (Levit. xix. 18; Mark xii. 29-31). Thus his in- 
stinct for God and his instinct for the essential carry 
him to the very center and acme of Moses' law. At the 
same time he can use the Old Testament in an efficient 
way for dialectic, when an argumentum ad hominern best 
meets the case (Mark vii. 6; Luke xx. 37, 44). 

Going to fact directly and reading his Bible on his 
own account, he is the great pioneer of the Christian 
habit of mind. He is not idly called the Captain by the 
writer to the Hebrews (Heb. ii. 10, xii. 2). Authority 
and tradition only too readily assume control of human 
life; but a mind like that of Jesus, like that which he 
gave to his followers, will never be bound by authority 






THE MAN AND HIS MIND 61 

and tradition. Moses is very well, but if God has higher 
ideas of marriage — what then? The Scribes and the 
Pharisees sit in Moses' seat (Matt, xxiii. 2), but that 
does not make them equal to Moses; still less does it make 
their traditions of more importance than God's com- 
mandments (Mark vii. 1-13). The Sabbath itself "was 
made for man, and not man for the Sabbath" (Mark ii. 27). 
Where the habit of mind is thus set to fact, and life is 
based on God, on God's will and God's doings, it is not 
surprising that in the daily round there should be noted 
"sanity, reserve, composure, and steadiness.' 3 It may 
seem to be descending to a lower plane, but it is worth 
while to look for a moment at the sheer sense which Jesus 
can bring to bear on a situation. The Sabbath — is it 
lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Well, if a man's one 
sheep is in a pit on the Sabbath, what will he do? (Matt. 
xii. 11), or will he refrain from leading his ox to the water 
on a Sabbath (Luke xiii. 15)? Such questions bring a 
theological problem into the atmosphere of sense — and it 
is better solved there. He is interrupted by a demand 
that he arbitrate between a man and his brother; and his 
reply is virtually, Does your brother accept your choice 
of an arbitrator? (Luke xii. 14) — and that matter is 
finished. "Are there few that be saved?' 5 asks some one 
in vague speculation, and he gets a practical answer 
addressed to himself (Luke xiii. 23). Even in matters 
of ordinary manners and good taste, he offers a shrewd 
rule (Luke xiv. 8). Luke records also two or three in- 
stances of perfectly banal talk and ejaculation addressed 
to him — the bazar talk of the Galilean murders (Luke 
xiii. 1; cf. Chapter II., p. 37) — the pious if rather obvious 
remark of some man about feasting in the Kingdom of 




62 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

God (Luke xiv. 15) — and the woman's homely congratu- 
lation of Mary on her son (Luke xi. 27). In each case 
he gets away to something serious. 

Above all, we must recognize the power which every 
one felt in him. Even Herod, judging by rumor, counts 
him greater than John the Baptist (Matt. xiv. 2). The 
very malignity of his enemies is a confession of their 
recognition that they are dealing with some one who is 
great. Men remarked his sedative and controlling in- 
fluence over the disordered mind (Mark i. 27). He is 
not to be trapped in his talk, to be cajoled or flattered. 
There is greatness in his language — in his reference of 
everything to great principles and to God; greatness in 
his freedom from ambition, in his contempt of advertise- 
ment and popularity, in his appeal to the best in men, in 
his belief in men, in his power of winning and keeping 
friends, in his gift for making great men out of petty. 
In all this we are not stepping outside the Gospels nor 
borrowing from what he has done in nineteen centuries. 
In Galilee and in Jerusalem men felt his power. And 
finally, what of his calm, his sanity, his dignity, in the 
hour of betrayal, in the so-called trials, before the priests, 
before Pilate, on the Cross? The Pharisees, said Ter- 
tullian, ought to have recognized who Christ was by his 
patience. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 

It was as a teacher that Jesus of Nazareth first began 
to gather disciples round him. But to understand the 
work of the Teacher, we must have some general impres- 
sion of the world to which he came. The background will 
help us understand what had to be done, and what it was 
that he meant to do. 

Bishop Gore, in a book recently published, suggested 
that the belief that God is Love is not axiomatic. Many 
of us take it for granted, as the point at which religion 
naturally begins; but, as he emphasized, it is not an 
obvious truth; it is something of which we have to be 
convinced, something that has to be made good to men. 
Unless we bear this in mind, we shall miss a great deal 
of what Jesus has really done, by assuming that he was 
not needed to do it. 

"Out of a darker world than ours came this new spring." 
We must look at the world as it was, when Jesus came. 
In a later chapter we shall have to consider more fully 
the religions of the Roman world. One or two points 
may be anticipated. First of all, we have to realize what 
a hard world it was. Men and women are harder than 
we sometimes think, and the natural hardness to which 
the human heart grows of itself, needed more correction 
than it had in those days. Among the many papyrus 
documents that have been found in late years in Egypt — 

63 



i 



64 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

documents that have pictured for us the life of Egypt, 
and have recorded for us also the language of the New 
Testament in a most illuminative way — there is one that 
illustrates only too aptly the unconscious hardness of the 
times. It is a letter — no literary letter, no letter that any 
one would ordinarily have thought of keeping; it has 
survived by accident. It was written by an Egyptian 
Greek to his wife. She lived somewhere up the country, 
and he had gone to Alexandria. She had been expecting 
a baby when he left, and he wrote a rough, but not an 
unkind, letter to her. He writes: "Hilarion to Alis . . . 
greetings. . . . Know that we are still even now in Alex- 
andria. Do not fidget, if, at the general return, I stay 
in Alexandria. I pray and beseech you, take care of the 
little child, and as soon as we have our wages, I will 
send you up something. If you are delivered, if it was a 
male, let it live; if it was a female, cast it out. . . . How 
can I forget you? So don't fidget." 1 The letter is not 
an unkind one; it is sympathetic, masculine, direct, and 
friendly. And then it ends with the suggestion, incon- 
ceivable to us to-day, that if the baby is a girl, it need 
not be kept. It can be put out either on the land or in 
the river, left to kite or crocodile. The evidence of satirists 
is generally to be discounted, because they tend to em- 
phasize the exceptional; and it is not the exceptional 
thing that gives the character of an age, or of a man. 
It is the kind of thing that we take for granted and 
assume to be normal that shows our character or gives 
the note of the day; and what we omit to notice may be 
as revealing. In the plays of the Athenian comic poets 

1 Cf. Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, p. 154. I have 
omitted one or two less relevant clauses — e.g. greetings to friends. 



THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 65 



of the third and fourth centuries B.C. we find to weari- 
someness one recurring plot. The heroine turns out to 
be, not just a common girl, but the daughter of the best 
family in Athens, exposed when she was a baby. When 
Plato sketched his ideal constitution, in addition to the 
mating of suitable pairs to be decided by government, 
he added that, if the offspring were not good enough, 
it should be put away where it would not be found again. 
Aristotle allowed the same practice. The most cultured 
race on earth freely exposed its infants; and this letter of 
Hilarion to Alis — a dated letter by the way, of September 
or October in the year 1 a.d. — makes it clear that the 
practice of exposure of children still prevailed; and there 
is other evidence which need not now detain us. It is a 
hard world, where kind people or good people can think 
of such things as ordinary and natural. 

Evidence of the character of an age is given by the 
treatment of criminals; and that age was characterized 
by crucifixion. They would take a human being, spread 
him out on a cross on the ground, drive nails through his 
hands and feet; and then the cross was raised — the agony 
of the victim during the movement is not to be imagined. 
It was made fast; and there the victim hung, suspended 
between heaven and earth, to live or die at his leisure. 
By and by crows would gather round him. "I have been 
good," said the slave. "Then you have your reward,' 3 
says the Latin poet, "you will not feed the crows on 
the cross." 1 There is a very striking phrase in St. 
Matthew: "And sitting down they watched him there" 
(Matt, xxvii. 36). The soldiers nailed three men to 
crosses, and sat down beneath them to dice for their 

1 Horace, Epistles, i. 16, 48. 



QQ THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

clothes. Our tolerances, like our utterances, come out 
of the abundance of the heart, and stamp us for what 
we are. 

We cannot easily realize all that slavery meant. When 
we read in the Fourth Gospel that "the Lamb of God 
taketh away the sin of the world" (John i. 29), that was 
written before Jesus Christ had abolished slavery; for, 
we remember, it was done by his people against the 
judgment of the business experts. Slavery meant robbing 
the man of every right that Nature gave him; and, as 
Homer said long ago, "Farseeing Zeus takes away half a 
man's manhood, when he brings the day of slavery upon 
him." 1 He became a thief, a liar, dirty, and bad; and 
with the woman it was still worse. The slave woman was 
a little lower than the animal; she might not have off- 
spring. It was "natural," men said; "Nature had de- 
signed certain races to be slaves; slavery was written in 
Nature; it was Nature's law.' 3 These were not the 
thoughts of vulgar people, but of some of the best of 
the Greeks — not of all, indeed; but society was organ- 
ized on the basis of slavery. It was an accepted axiom 
of all social and economic life. 

As to the spiritual background, for the present let 
us postpone the heathen world and consider the Jews, 
who represented in some ways the world's highest at 
this period. Modern scholarship is shedding fresh light 
on the literature and ideas that were prevalent between 
the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the 
New. But what uncertainty about God! Why some 
people should think that it was easier to believe in God 
in those days than now, I do not see. Far less was known 



1 Homer, Odyssey, xvii. 322. 






THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 67 

of God; the record of his doings was not so long as it is 
for us, and it was not so well known. No one could 
understand what God meant, if he was quite clear him- 
self. Look at what he did with the nation. He chose 
Israel, he established the kingdom of David. They did 
not get on very well, and at last were carried away into 
captivity in Babylon. So much he did for his people; 
and when he brought them back again to the Promised 
Land, it was to a very trying and difficult situation; and 
worse still followed after Nehemiah's day. Alexander the 
Great's conquest of the East left a Macedonian dynasty 
ruling those regions, and one of their great kings, An- 
tiochus Epiphanes, tried to stamp out the religion of 
Jehovah altogether. The Book of Daniel is a record of 
that persecution about 166 B.C. The Maccabaean brothers 
delivered Israel, and rescued the religion of Jehovah; and 
a kingdom of a sort was established with them; but the 
grandsons of the liberators became tyrants. What did 
God mean? Out of all the promises to Israel, to the 
House of David, this is what comes. Herod follows — a 
foreign king and an Edomite; and the Romans are over 
all, suzerains and rulers. 

In despair of the present men began to forecast the 
future. A time will surely come, they said, when God 
will give an anointed one, the Messiah; he will set all 
Israel free, will make Israel rule the world instead of 
the Romans; he will gather together the scattered of 
Israel from the four winds, reunite and assemble God's 
people in triumph in Palestine. And then, when the 
prophet paused, a plain man spoke: "I don't care if he 
does. My father all his life looked forward to that. 
What does it matter now, if God redeems his people, or 



68 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

if he does not? My father is dead." The answer was, 
why should your father not come with the redeemed 
Israel? But what evidence is there for that? Does God 
care for people beyond the grave? Is there personal 
immortality? — that became the anxious question. 1 

But is this kingdom of the Messiah to be an earthly 
or a heavenly kingdom? Will it be in Jerusalem or in 
heaven? Are you quite sure that there is any distinc- 
tion in the other world between good and bad, between 
Jew and Gentile? Some people thought the kingdom 
would be in Jerusalem; others said it would be in heaven, 
and added that the Jews will look down and see the 
Gentiles in hell — something worth seeing at last. But, 
after all, it was still guesswork — "perhaps" was the last 
word. 

When the question is asked, "Was Jesus the Messiah?" 
the obvious reply is, "Which Messiah?" For there seems 
to have been no standard idea of the Messiah. The 
Messiah was, on the whole, as vague a term as, in mod- 
ern politics, Socialism or Tariff Reform. Neither of them 
has come; perhaps they never will come, and nobody 
knows what they will be till they do come. Jesus is not 
what they expected. A Jewish girl, at an American 
Student Conference a year or two ago, said about Jesus: 
"I do not think he is the Messiah, but I do love him.' 3 
Of course he was not in her Jewish sense. The term was 
a vague one. The main point was that men were un- 
certain about God. God was unintelligible. They did 
not understand his ideas, either for the nation or for the 

1 It is only about four times that personal immortality comes 
with any clearness in the Old Testament: Psalms lxxii. and cxxxix.; 
Isaiah xxvi.; and Job xix. 26. 



THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 69 

individual; God's plans miscarried with such fatality. 
Or if he had some deeper design, it was still all guess- 
work. It seemed likely, or at least right, that he should 
achieve somehow the final damnation of the Gentiles — 
the Romans, and the rest of us — but nothing was very 
clear. In the meantime, if God was going to damn 
the Gentiles in the next world, why should not the Jews 
do it in this? Human nature has only too ready an 
answer for such a question — as we can read in too manj^ 
dark pages of history, in the stories of wars and religious 
persecutions. 

The uncertainty about God in Judaism reacted on 
life and made it hard. 

Even the virtues of men were difficult; they were 
apt to be nerveless and uncertain, because their aim 
was uncertain, and they wanted inspiration. Of course 
there are always kindly hearts;, but a man will never 
put forth quite his best for an uncertainty. There was 
a want of center about their virtues, a want of faith, 
and as a result they were too largely self -directed. 1 A 
man was virtuous in order to secure himself in case 
God should be awkward. There was no sufficient re- 
lation between man and God. God was judge, no 

1 Cf. A. E. J. Rawlinson, Dogma, Fact and Experience, p. 16. 
"All the virtues in the Aristotelian canon are self-contained states 
of the virtuous man himself. ... In the last resort they are 
entirely self-centered adornments or accomplishments of the good 
man; and it is significant of this self-centeredness of the entire 
conception that the qualities of display (megaloprepeia) and high- 
mindedness, or proper pride (megalopsychia), are insisted on as 
integral elements of the ideal character. On the other hand, the 
three characteristic Christian virtues — faith, hope and charity — 
all postulate Another," 



70 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

doubt; but his character could be known from his at- 
titude to the Gentiles. Could a man count on God and 
how far? Could he rely on God supporting him, on God 
wishing to have him in this world and the next? No, 
not with any certainty. It comes to a fundamental un- 
belief in God, resting, as Jesus saw, on an essential mis- 
conception of God's nature; and this resulted in the 
spoiling of life. Men did not use God. "Where your 
treasure is, there will your heart be also," Jesus said 
(Luke xii. 34); and it was not in God. Men's interest 
and belief were elsewhere. 

Now the first thing that Jesus had to do, as a teacher, 
was to induce men to rethink God. Men, he saw, do 
not want precepts; they do not want ethics, morals 
or rules; what they do need is to rethink God, to re- 
discover him, to re-explore him, to live on the basis of 
relation with God. There is one striking difference 
between Christianity and the other religions, in that the 
others start with the idea that God is known. Christians 
do not so start. We are still exploring God on the lines of 
Jesus Christ — rethinking God all the time, finding him 
out. That is what Jesus meant us to do. If Jesus had 
merely put before men an ethical code, that would have 
been to do what the moralists had done before him — 
what moralists always do, with the same naive idea 
that they are doing a great deal for us. His object 
was far more fundamental. 

The first thing was to bring people on to the very 
center and to get there at once — to get men away from 
the accumulation of occasional and self-directed virtues, 
from the self-sustained life, from self-acquired right- 
eousness, and to bring them to face the fact of God, 



THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 71 

to realize the seriousness of God and of life, and to see God. 
When he preached self-denial, he did not mean the 
modern virtue of self-denial with all its pettinesses, but a 
genuine negation of self, a total forgetfulness of self 
by having the mind set entirely on God and God's pur- 
poses, a readjustment of everything with God as the real 
center of all. This is always difficult; it is not less difficult 
where the conception of God is, as it was with Jesus, entirely 
spiritual. The whole experience of mankind was against 
the idea that there could be a religion at all without 
priest, sacrifice, altar, temple, and the like. There is a 
very minimum of symbol and cult in the teaching of 
Jesus — so little that the ancient world thought the 
Christians were atheists, because they had no image, 
no temple, no sacrifice, no ritual, nothing that suggested 
religion in the ordinary sense of the word. We shall 
realize the difficulty of what Jesus was doing when we 
grasp that he meant people to see God independently 
of all their conventional aids. To lead them to commit 
themselves in act to God on such terms was a still more 
difficult thing. To believe in God in a general sort of 
way, to believe in Providence at large, is a very different 
thing from getting yourself crucified in the faith that 
God cares for you, and yet somehow wishes you to endure 
crucifixion. How far will men commit themselves to 
God? Jesus means them to commit themselves to God 
right up to the hilt — as Bunyan put it, "to hazard all 
for God at a clap." Decision for God, obedience to 
God, that is the prime thing — action on the basis of 
God and of God's care for the individual. 

His purpose that this shall not be merely the religion 
of choice spirits or of those immediately around him, 



72 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

but shall be the one religion of all the world, makes 
the task still vaster. He means not merely to touch 
the Jews. Whether he says so in explicit terms or not, 
it is implied in all that he says and does, that the new 
movement should be far wider than anything the world 
had ever seen; it was to cover the whole of mankind. 
He meant that every individual in all the world should 
have the center of gravity of his thinking shifted. 

Again, he had to think of a re-creation of the language 
of men, till God should be a new word. Our constant 
problem is to give his word his value, his meaning. He 
meant that men should learn their religious vocabulary 
again, till the words they used should suggest his mean- 
ings to their minds. Something of this was achieved, 
when some of his disciples came to him and said: "Teach 
us to pray, as John also taught his disciples" (Luke xi. 1). 
Further, he had to secure that men should begin the 
rethinking of all life — personal, social, and national — 
from the very foundations, on new lines — what is called 
a trans valuation of all values. With a new center, 
everything has to be thought out anew into what St. 
Paul calls the fulness of Christ (Eph. iv. 13). Then 
finally the question comes, how to secure continuity? 
Will the movement outlast his personal influence? These 
are his problems — large enough, every one of them. How 
does he face them? 

The Gospel began with friendship, and we know 
from common life what that is, and how it works. Old 
acquaintance and intimacy are the heart of it. The 
mind is on the alert when we meet the stranger — quick 
and eager to master his outlook and his ways of thought, 
to see who and what he is — it is critical, self-protective, 



THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 73 

rather than receptive. But, as time goes on, we notice 
less, we study the man less as we see more of him. Yet, 
in this easier and more careless intercourse, when the 
mind is off guard, it is receiving a host of unnoticed 
impressions, which in the long run may have extraordinary 
influence. Pleasant and easy-going, a perpetual source 
of interest and rest of mind, the friendship continues, 
till we find to our surprise that we are changed. Stage 
by stage, as one comes to know one's friend, by uncon- 
scious and freely given sympathy, one lives the other 
man's life, sees and feels things as he does, slips into his 
language, and, by degrees, into his thoughts — and then 
wakes up to find oneself, as it were, remade by the other's 
personality, so close has been the identification with 
the man we grew to love. This is what we find in our 
own lives; and we find it in the Gospels. 

A sentence from St. Augustine's Confessions gives 
us the key to the whole story. Sed ex amante alio ac- 
cenditur alius (Confessions, iv. 14, 21). "One loving 
spirit sets another on fire.' 3 Jesus brings men to the 
new exploration of God, to the new commitment of 
themselves to God, simply by the ordinary mechanism 
of friendship and love. This, in plain English, is after 
all the idea of Incarnation — friendship and identification. 
Jesus has a genius for friendship, a gift for understanding 
the feelings of men. Look, for example, at the quick 
word to Jairus. As soon as the message comes to him 
that his daughter is dead, Jesus wheels round on him at 
once with a word of courage (Mark v. 36). This quick- 
ness in understanding, in feeling with people, marks 
him throughout. An instinctive care for other people's 
small necessities is a great mark of friendship, and Jesus 



74 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

has it. We find him saying to his disciples: "Come ye 
yourselves apart privately into a desert place, and rest 
awhile" (Mark vi. 31). What a beautiful suggestion! 
He himself, it is clear from the records, felt the need 
of privacy, of being by oneself, of quiet; and he took his 
quiet hours in the open, in the wild, where there was 
solitude and Nature, and there he would take his friends. 
There were so many coming and going, that they had 
no leisure to eat, and Jesus says to them in his friendly 
way: "Let us get out of this — away by ourselves, to 
a quiet place; what you want is rest." What a beautiful 
idea! — to go camping out on the hillside, under the 
trees, to rest — and with him to share the quiet of the lonely 
place. It is not the only time when he offers to give 
people rest — "Come unto Me . . . and I will give you 
rest" (Matt. xi. 28). How strange, when one thinks 
of the restless activity of Christian people to-day, with 
typewriters and conventions, and every modern method 
of consuming energy and time! How sympathetic 
he is! 

We may notice again his respect for the reserve of 
other people. On the whole, how slowly Jesus comes 
to work with men! He never "rushes" the human 
spirit; he respects men's personalities. Men and women 
are never pawns with him. He does not think of them 
in masses. The masses appeal to him, but that is be- 
cause he sees the individual all the time. To one of 
his disciples he says, "I have prayed for thee" (Luke xxii. 
32). What a contrast to the conventional "friend of 
man" in the abstract! With all that hangs upon him, 
he has leisure to pray intensely, for a single man. 
It gives us an idea of his gifts in friendship. His faith 



THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 75 

in his people is quite remarkable, when we think of 
it. He believes in his followers; he shares with them 
some of the deepest things in his life; he counts them 
fit to share his thought of God. He makes it quite clear to 
them how he trusts them. He puts before them the 
tremendous work that he has to do— work more ap- 
palling in its vastness the more one studies it; and then 
he tells them that he is trusting the whole thing with 
them. What a faith it implies in their moral capacity! 
What acceptance of the dim beginnings of the character 
that was to be Christian! Someone has spoken of his 
"apparently unjustified faith in Peter." What names 
he can give to his friends as a result of this faith in them ! 
"Ye are the light of the world," he says (Matt. v. 14), 
"the salt of the earth." When we remind ourselves 
of his clear vision, his genius for seeing fact, how much 
must such praises have meant to these men! 

Think how he gives himself to them in earnest; how 
he is at their disposal. He is theirs; they can cross- 
question him at leisure; they tell him that the Pharisees 
did not like what he said (Matt. xv. 12), they doubt 
with Peter the wisdom of his open speech (Mark viii. 
32); they criticize him (Matt. xiii. 10). If they do 
not understand his parable, they ask what he means 
(Matt. xv. 15) and keep on asking till he makes it plain. 
He is in no hurry. He is the Master and their Teacher, 
and he is at the service of the slowest of them. 

But there is another side to friendship; for one great 
part of it is taking what our friends do for us, as well 
as doing things for them. How he will take what they 
have to give! He lets them manage the boat, while 
he sleeps (Mark iv. 38), and go and prepare for him 



76 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

(Luke ix. 52), and see to the Passover meal (Mark xiv. 
13). The women, we read, ministered to him of their 
substance (Luke viii. 3). There is a very significant 
phrase in St. Luke (xxii. 28), where he says to them 
at the end: "Ye are they that have continued with me 
in my temptations." He tells them there that they have 
helped him. How? Apparently by being with him. 
Is not that friendship? In the same chapter (Luke xxii. 
15) we find an utterance that reveals the depth of his 
feeling for his friends: "With desire I have desired (a 
Greek rendering of a Semitic intensive) to eat this pass- 
over with you before I suffer." They are to help him 
again by being with him, and he has longed for it, he 
says. The Gospel of John sums up the whole story in a 
beautiful sentence: "Jesus, having loved his own which 
were in the world, loved them unto the end" (John xiii. 
1) , Augustine is right. "One loving spirit sets another 
on fire." 

Note again the word which he uses in speaking to 
them (Tekna: Mark ii. 5, x. 24). It is a diminutive, 
a little disguised as "children" in our English version. 
It reappears in the Fourth Gospel in even more dimin- 
utive forms (Teknia, xiii. 33; Paidia, xxi. 5) with a pecu- 
liarly tender suggestion. The word of Mark answers 
more closely than anything I know to "Boys," as we 
used it in the Canadian Universities. "Men," or "Un- 
dergraduates," is the word in the English Universities; 
Students," in Scotland and in India; in Canada we said 
Boys"; and I think we get nearer, and like one another 
better, with that easy name. And it was this friendly, 
pleasant word, or one very like it, that he used with 
them. Nor is it the only one of the kind. "Fear not, 



a 



it 






\ THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 77 

little flock!" he said (Luke xii. 32). Do not the diminu- 
tives mean something? Do they not take us into the 
midst of a group where friendship is real? And in the 
center is the friendliest figure of all. 

Look for a moment at the men who followed him; 
at the type he calls. They are simple people in the 
main — warm hearts and impulsive natures. The 
politics of Simon the Zealot might at one time have been 
summed up as "the knife and plenty of it," a simple and 
direct enough type of political thought, in all conscience, 
however hopeless and ineffectual, as history showed; 
but he gave up his politics for the friendship of Jesus. 
Peter, again, is the champion example of the impulsive 
nature. Why Jesus called James and John "the sons 
of thunder" (Mark iii. 17) I am not sure. Dr. Rendel 
Harris thinks because they were twins; other people find 
something of the thunderstorm in their ideas and out- 
look. The publican in the group is of much the same 
type; he is ready to leave his business and his custom- 
house at a word — once more the impulsive nature and 
the simple. It is possible that Jesus looked also to 
another type of which he gained very little in his life- 
time; for he speaks of "the scribe who has turned disciple 
again, and brings out of his treasure things new and 
old" (Matt. xiii. 52) — the more complicated type of 
the trained scholar, full of old learning, but open to 
new views. In the meantime he draws to him people 
with the warm heart— yes, he says, but cultivate the 
cool head (cf. Matt. x. 16). Again and again he will have 
men "count the cost" (Luke xiv. 28) — know what they 
are doing, be rid of delusions before they follow him 
(Mark viii. 34). What did they expect? They had all 



78 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

sorts of dreams of the future. When we first find them, 
there is friction among them, which is not unnatural 
in a group of men with ambitions (Mark ix. 33. x. 37). 
Even at the Last Supper their minds run on thrones 
(Luke xxii. 24). They are haunted by taboos. Peter 
long after boasts that nothing common or unclean has 
entered his lips (Acts x. 14). They fail to understand 
him. "Are ye also without understanding?" he asks, 
not without surprise (Mark viii. 17, 21). At the very 
end they run away. 

There, then, is the group. What is to be the method? 
There is not much method. As Harnack says about 
the spread of the early Church, "A living faith needs no 
special methods" — a sentence worth remembering. "In- 
finite love in ordinary intercourse' ' is another phrase of 
Harnack in describing the life of the early Church. It 
began with Jesus. He chose twelve, says Mark (iii. 
14), "that they may be with him." That is all. And 
they are with him under all sorts of circumstances. 
"The Son of Man hath not where to lay his head" (Luke 
ix. 58). They saw him in privation, fatigued, exhausted. 
With every chance to see weaknesses in his character, 
they did not find much amiss with him. That is surely 
significant. They lived with him all the time, in a 
genuine human friendship, a real and progressive intimacy. 
They were with him in popularity and in unpopularity; 
they were with him in danger, when Herod tried to kill 
him and he went out of Herod's territory. But friend- 
ship depends not only on great moments; it means com- 
panionship in the trivial, too, it means idle hours to- 
gether, partnership in commonplace things — meals and 
garden-chairs as well as books and crises. Ordinary 



THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 79 

life, ordinary talk, gossip, chat, every kind of conver- 
sation about Herods and Roman governors, and the 
Zealots — custom-house memories, tales of the fisher- 
men's life on the lake, stories of neighbors and home — 
rumors about the Galileans who were murdered by 
Pilate (Luke xiiL 1-4) — all the babbling talk of the bazar 
is round Jesus and his group, and some of it breaks in 
on them; and his attitude to it all is to these men a con- 
stant revelation of character. They are with him in 
the play of feelings, with him in the fluxes and refluxes of 
his thought — learning his ways of mind without realizing 
it. They slip into his mind and mood, by a series of 
surprises, when they are imagining no such thing. Any- 
thing, everything serves to reveal him. They tramp 
all day, and ask some village people to shelter them 
for the night. The villagers tell them to go away. The 
men are hungry and fatigued. "What a splendid thing 
it would be, if we could do like Elijah and burn them 
up with a word!" So the hot thought rose. He turned 
and said, "You know not what manner of spirit you are 
of. "—-What a gentle rebuke! "The Son of Man is not 
come to destroy men's lives, but to save them" (Luke 
ix. 51-56). Then follows one of the wonderful sentences 
of the Gospel, "they went unto another village" — very 
obvious, but very significant. A missionary from China 
told me how, thirty years ago or more, he was driven out 
of the town where he lived; how the gentlefolk egged on 
the mob, and they wrecked his house, and hounded 
him out of the place. He told me how it felt — the misery 
and the indignity of it. Jesus took it undisturbed. 
He taught a lesson in it which the Church has never 
forgotten. 



80 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

Their life was full of experiences shared with him. 
He has his reserve — his secret; yet, in another sense, 
he gives himself to them without reserve; there is prodi- 
gality of self-impartation in his dealings with them. 
He lets them have everything they can take. He be- 
comes theirs in a great intimacy, he gives himself to 
them. Why? Because he believes, as he put it, in 
seed. Socrates saw that the teacher's real work, his 
only work, is to implant the idea, like a seed; an idea, 
like a seed, will look after itself. A king builds a temple 
or a palace. The seed of a banyan drifts into a crack, 
and grows without asking anyone's leave; there is life 
in it. In the end the building comes down, but for 
what the banyan holds up. The leaven in the meal 
is the most powerful thing there. There is very little 
of it, but that does not matter; it is alive (Matt. xiii. 
33). Life is a very little thing, but it is the only thing that 
counts. That is why the farmer can sow his fields and 
sleep at nights without thinking of them; and the crop 
grows in spite of his sleeping, and he knows it (Mark iv. 
26). That is why Jesus believes so thoroughly in his 
men, and in his message; God has made the one for the 
other, and there is no fear of mischance. 

Look at his method of teaching. People "marveled 
at his words of charm" (Luke iv. 22) — "hung about 
him to hear him" (Luke xix. 48). He said that the 
word is the overflow of the heart. "Out of the abundance 
of the heart the mouth speaketh" (Matt. xii. 34; Luke 
vi. 45). What a heart, then, his words reveal! How 
easy and straightforward his language is! To-day 
we all use abstract nouns to convey our meaning; we 
cannot do without words ending in -ality and -ation. 




THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 81 

But there is no recorded saying of Jesus where he uses 
even "personality." He does not use abstract nouns. 
He sticks to plain words. When he speaks about God 
he does not say "the Great First Cause," or "Providence," 
or any other vague abstract. Still less does he use an 
adverb from the abstract, like "providentially." He 
says, "your heavenly Father." He does not talk of 
"humanity"; he says, "your brethren.' 2 He has no 
jargon, no technical terms, no scholastic vocabulary. 
He urges men not to over-study language; their speech 
must be simple, the natural, spontaneous overflow of 
the heart. 1 Jesus told his disciples not to think out 
beforehand what they would say when on trial (Mark 
xiii. 11) — it would be "given" to them. He was per- 
fectly right; and when Christians obeyed him, they 
always spoke much better than when they thought out 
speeches beforehand. They said much less for one thing, 
and they said it much better. Take the case of the 
martyr — an early and historical one — whose two speeches 
were during her trial Christiana sum and, on her condemna- 
tion, Deo gratias. 

With this remark his own gift of arresting phrase; 
the freshness of his language, how free it is from quota- 
tion, how natural and how extraordinarily simple. Every- 
thing worth while can be put in simple language; and, 
if the speech is complicated, it is a call to think again. 
"As a woman over-curiously trimmed is to be mistrusted, 
so is a speech," said John Robinson of Ley den, the min- 
ister of the Pilgrim Fathers. The language of Jesus is 
simple and direct, the inevitable expression of a rich 



1 Cf. Chapter II., p. 39. 




82 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

nature and a habit of truth. You feel he does not strain 
after effect — epigram, antithesis, or alliteration. Of 
course he uses such things — like all real speakers — but 
he does not go out of his way for them. No, and so much 
the more significant are such characteristic antitheses 
as: "Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Luke xvi. 13), 
and "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it" (Matt, 
xvi. 25), coming with a spontaneous flash, and answering 
in their sharpness to the sharp edges of fact. His words 
caught the attention, and lived in the memory; they re- 
vealed such a nature; they were so living and unforget- 
table. 

Remark once again his preference for the actual and 
the ordinary. There are religions in which holiness 
involves unusual conditions and special diet. Some 
forms of mysticism seem to be incompatible with married 
life. But the type of holiness which Jesus teaches can 
be achieved with an ordinary diet, and a wife and five 
children. He had lived himself in a family of eight or nine. 
It is perhaps harder, but it is a richer sanctity, if the 
real mark of a Saint is, as we have been told, that he 
makes it easier for others to believe in God. In any 
case the ordinary is always good enough with Jesus. 
Only he would have men go deeper, always deeper. Why 
can you not think for yourselves? he asks. Signs were 
what men demanded. He pictures Dives' mind running 
on signs even in hell (Luke xvi. 27). "What could you 
do with signs? Look at what you have already. You 
read the weather for to-morrow by looking at the sky 
to-day. The south wind means heat; the red sky fair 
weather. Study, look, think" (Luke xii. 55). His 
animals, as we saw, are all real animals; it is real obser- 






THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 83 

vation; real analogy. When he speaks of the lost sheep, 
it is not a fictitious joy that he describes or an imaginary 
one; it is real. The more we examine his sayings with 
any touch of his spirit, the more we wonder. Of course 
it is possible to handle them in the wrong way, to miss 
the real thought and make folly of everything. Thus, 
when he says he is the door, the interpreter may stray 
into silly detail and make faith the key, and — I don't 
know what the panels and hinges could be. That is not 
the style of Jesus. The soul of the thing, the great central 
meaning, the real analogy is his concern. Seriousness 
in observation, seriousness in reflection, is what he teaches. 
Men and women break down for want of thinking things 
out. Many things become possible to those who think 
seriously, as he did — and, so to speak, without watertight 
compartments. 

Jesus is always urging seriousness in reflection. Se- 
riousness in action, too, is one of his lessons — an em- 
phasis on doing, but on doing with a clear sense of what 
one is about, and why. A part of action is clear thought; 
always exactness, accuracy; you must think the thing 
out, he says, and then act or let it alone. The artistic 
temperament, we all know, is very much in evidence 
to-day. In The Comments of Bagshot we are told that 
the drawback is that there is so much temperament and 
so little art. Why? Because the artistic temperament 
means so little by itself. It is one of the secrets of Jesus, 
that it is action that illuminates. What is it that makes 
the poem? The poet sees beggar children running 
races, or little Edward and the weather-cock, or something 
greater if you like — the light on a woman's hair, or a 
flower; and you say, he has his poem. He has not. 



84 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

He must work at the thing. When we study the great 
poets, we realize how these things are worked out to 
the point of nerve-strain and exhaustion. The poet 
devotes himself heart and soul to the work; he alters 
this and that, once and again; he sees a fresh aspect 
of the thing, and he alters all again; he writes and re- 
writes, getting deeper and deeper into the essential 
values of the thing all the time. Where in all this is 
the artistic temperament? It gave him the impulse, 
but something else achieves the work of art. I have 
a feeling that the great works of art are achieved by 
the shopkeeper virtues in addition to the artistic tempera- 
ment that sees and feels them at the beginning. It is 
action that gives the value of a thought. Jesus sees 
that. He says that frankly to his disciples. If you want 
tc understand in the long run, it is carrying the cross 
that will teach you the real values. 

I have been treating him almost as if he were an au- 
thority on pedagogy. Fortunately, he never discussed 
pedagogy, never used the terms I have been using. But 
he dealt with men, he taught and he influenced them, 
and it is worth our study to understand how he did it — to 
master his methods. "One loving spirit sets another 
on fire." As for the effects of his words at once, as Seeley 
put it, they were "seething effervescence . . . broodings, 
resolutions, travail of heart." Men were brought face 
to face with a new issue; it was a time of choice; things 
would not be as they were — men must be "with him or 
against him" — must accept or reject the new teaching, 
the new teacher, the new life. As he said, "I came to 
send fire on the earth" (Luke xii. 49), to divide families, 
to divide the individual soul against itself, till the great 



THE TEACHER AND THE DISCIPLES 85 

choice was made; and so it has always been, where men 
have really seen him. We have to notice further the 
transformation of the disciples, who definitely accepted 
him. "Very wonderful to me,' 3 wrote Phillips Brooks, 
"to see how the disciples caught his method." The 
promise was made to them that they should become 
fishers of men (Mark i. 17), and it was fulfilled. Jesus 
made them strong enough to defy the world and to 
capture the world. There is something attractive about 
them; they have his secret, something of his charm; they 
are magnetic with his power. A new impulse to win 
men marks them, a new power to do it, a new faith which 
grows in significance as you study it — the faith of William 
Carey, a hundred years ago, was the same thing — a per- 
fectly incredible faith, that they actually will win men 
for God and Christ. And they did — and along his 
lines and by his methods of love — even for Gentiles. 
"Woe is me, if I preach not the Gospel," says St. Paul 
(1 Cor. ix. 16), who to preach the Gospel shipwrecked 
his life and suffered the loss of all things (Phil. iii. 8). 
But these men are sure that it is worth while. They 
have a new passion for men and women — an interest 
not merely in the saving of their souls but in every real 
human need. The early Church made a point of teaching 
men trades when they had none. They learnt all this 
from him. The greatest miracle in history seems to 
me the transformation that Jesus effected in those men. 
Everything else in Christian or secular history, com- 
pared to it, seems easy and explicable; and it was achieved 
by the love of Jesus. 

The Church spread over the world without social 
machinery. The Gospel was preached instinctively, nat- 



86 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

urally. The earliest Christians were persecuted in Jeru- 
salem, and were driven out. I picture one of them in 
flight; on his journey he falls in with a stranger. Be- 
fore he knows what he is doing, he is telling his fellow 
traveler about Jesus. It follows from his explanation 
of why he is on the road; he warms up as he speaks. 
He never really thought about the danger of doing so. 
And the stranger wants to know more; he is captured 
by the message, and he too becomes a Christian. And 
then this involuntary preacher of the Gospel is embar- 
rassed to learn that the man is a Gentile; he had not 
thought of that. I think that is how it began — so natural- 
ly and spontaneously. These people are so full of love 
of Jesus that they are bound to speak (Acts viii. 4). "One 
loving heart sets another on fire." 










CHAPTER V 

THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 

It is worth taking some trouble to realize how pro- 
foundly Jesus has changed the thinking of mankind 
about God. "Since Jesus lived," Dr. Fairbairn wrote, 
God has been another and nearer Being to man." 
Jesus," writes Dr. Fosdick, "had the most joyous idea 
of God that ever was thought of." That joyous sense of 
God he has given to his followers, and it stands in vivid 
contrast with the feelings men have toward God in the 
other religions. Christianity is the religion of joy. The 
New Testament is full of it. 

We know the general character of Jesus' attitude to 
God, his feeling for God, his sense of God's nearness. 
How immediate his knowledge of God is, how intimate! 
Of course, here, as everywhere, his teaching has such an 
occasional character — or else the records of it are so 
fragmentary — that we must not press the absence of sys- 
tem in it; and yet, I think, it would be right to say that 
Jesus puts before us no system of God, but rather sug- 
gests a great exploration, an intimacy with the slow and 
sure knowledge that intimacy gives. He has no definition 
of God, 1 but he assumes God, lives on the basis of God, 
interprets God; and God is discovered in his acts and his 
relations. He said to Peter, in effect — for the familiar 

1 A French mystic is quoted as saying, " Le Dieu dSfini est le 
Dieu fini." 

87 



88 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

phrase comes to this in modern English: "You think like 
a man; you don't think like God" (Mark viii. 33). Else- 
where he contrasts God's thoughts with man's — their 
outlooks are so different — "that which is highly esteemed 
among men is abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 
xvi. 15; the Greek words are very interesting). In other 
words, he would have men see all things as God sees 
them. That we do not so see them, remains the weak spot 
in our thinking. What Luther said to Erasmus is true 
of most of us: "Your thoughts concerning God are too 
human." "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall 
see God," said Jesus (Matt. v. 8), and throughout he em- 
phasizes that the vision of God depends on likeness to 
God — it is love and a glowing purity that give that 
faculty, rather than any power of intellect apart from 
them. Jesus brings men back to the ultimate fact. Our 
views are too short and too narrow. He would have us 
face God, see him and realize him — think in the terms of 
God, look at things from God's point of view, live in God 
and with God. In modern phrase, he breaks up our 
dogmatism and puts us at a universal point of view to 
see things over again in a new and true perspective. 

How and where did he begin himself? Whence came 
his consciousness of God, his gift for recognizing God? 
We do not know. The story of his growth, his inward 
growth, is almost unrevealed to us. We are told that 
he learnt "by the things which he suffered" (Heb. v. 8), 
and that he "increased in wisdom and stature, and in 
favor with God and man" (Luke ii. 52). Where does 
anyone begin, who takes us any great distance? It is 
very hard to know. Where did our own thoughts of God 
begin? What made them? How did they come? There 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 89 

is an inherited element in them, but how much else? 
Whence came the inherited element? How is it that to 
another man, with the same upbringing as ours, every- 
thing is different, everything means more? Remark, at 
any rate, in the teaching of Jesus, that there is no mys- 
ticism of the type so much studied to-day. There is 
nothing in the least "psychopathic" about him, nothing 
abnormal — no mystical vision of God, no mystical ab- 
sorption in God, no mystical union with God, no abstrac- 
tion, nothing that is the mark of the professed mystic. 
Yet he speaks freely of "seeing God"; he lives a life of 
the closest union with God; and God is in all his thoughts. 
A phrase like that of Clement of Alexandria, "deifying 
into apathy we become monadic," is seas away from 
anything we find in the speech of Jesus. That is not the 
way he preaches God. He is far more natural; and that 
his followers accepted this naturalness, and drew him so, 
and gave his teaching as he gave it, is a fresh pledge of 
the truthfulness of the Gospels. 

Again, his knowledge of God is not a matter of quota- 
tion, as ours very often tends to be. He is conscious 
always of the real nearness of God. He seems to wonder 
how it is that man can forget God. We do forget God. 
Augustine in his Confessions (iv. 12, 18) has to tell us 
that "God did not make the world and then go away." 
The practical working religion of a great many of us 
rests on a feeling that God is a very long way off. Our 
practical steps betray that we half think God did go 
away, when he had made the world. Prayer to us is not 
a real thing— it is not intercourse face to face; far too 
often it is like conversation over a telephone wire of 
infinite length which gets out of order. Even if words 



90 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

travel along that wire, there is so much "buzzing" that 
they are hardly recognizable. No, says Jesus, God is 
near, God is here — so near, that Jesus never feels that 
men have any need of a priesthood to come between, or 
to help them to God; God does all that. There is no 
common concern, no matter of food or clothing, no mere 
detail of the ordinary round of common duty and com- 
mon life — father and mother, son, wife, friend — nothing 
of all that, but God is there; God knows about it; God is 
interested in it; God has taken care of it; God is enjoying 
it. How is it that men can "reject the counsel of God," 
refuse God's plans and ideas (Luke vii. 30)? How is it 
that they forget God altogether? Jesus is surprised at 
the dullness of men's minds (Mark viii. 17); it is a mys- 
tery to him. The rich fool, as we call him, though it is 
hard to see why we should call him a fool, when he is so 
like ourselves, had forgotten God somehow, and was 
startled when God spoke, and spoke to him. That story, 
seen so often among men, — the story of the thorns chok- 
ing the seed (Matt. xiii. 22) — makes Jesus remark on the 
difficulty which a rich man finds in entering into the king- 
dom of God. 

God knows — that is what Jesus repeats, God cares; 
and God can do things; his hands are not tied by im- 
potence. The knowledge of God is emphasized by Jesus; 
"Even the very hairs of your head are all numbered" 
(Matt. x. 30); "your Father knoweth" (Luke xii. 30); 
"seeth in secret" (Matt. vi. 4); "knoweth your hearts" 
(Luke xvi. 15); knows your struggles, knows your wor- 
ries, knows your worth; God knows all about you. And 
"all things are possible with God" (Matt. xix. 26). There 
is nothing that he cannot do, nothing that he will not do, 




THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 91 

for his children. Will a father refuse his child bread; 
will God not give what is good? (Matt. vii. 11). Is it 
too big a thing for the Giver of Life to give food — which 
is the more difficult thing to give? (Luke xii. 23). Look 
at God, as Jesus draws him — interested in flowers; God 
takes care of them, and thinks about their colors, so 
that even "Solomon in all his glory" is not equal to them 
(Matt. vi. 30). God knows the birds in the nest — knows 
there is one fewer there to-day than there was yesterday 
(Matt. x. 29). God cares for them; how much more will 
he care for you (Matt. vi. 26)? "Ye are of more value 
than many sparrows" (Matt. x. 31). And God thinks 
out man's life in all its relations, and provides for it. 
Society moves on lines he laid down for it; his plans 
underlie all. Thus, when Jesus is challenged on the 
question of marriage and divorce, with that clear thought 
and eye of his, he goes right back to God's intent — not 
to man's usage, not to the common law and practice of 
nations, but to God's intent and God's meaning. God 
ordained marriage; he thought it out (Matt. xix. 4). 
Marriages will be better, if we think of them in this 
way, God gave men their food, does still, and all things 
that he gives are clean (Luke xi. 41). We cannot have 
taboos at our Father's table. 

Over all is God's throne (Matt, xxiii. 22). That idea, 
it seems to me, lapses somehow from our minds to-day. 
When Luther had to face the hostility of the Kaiser, 
the Emperor Charles V., he wrote to one of his friends: 
"Christ comes and sits at the right hand — not of the 
Kaiser, for in that case we should have perished long 
ago — but at the right hand of God. This is a great 
and incredible thing; but I enjoy it, incredible as it is; 



92 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

some day I mean to die in it. Why should I not live in 
it?" So Luther wrote — in not quite our modern vein. 
We hardly calculate on God as a factor; we omit him. 
Jesus did not. God's rule is over all; and in all our per- 
plexity, doubt, and fear, Jesus reminds us that the first 
thing is faith in God. The fact is that "Thine is the 
Kingdom" means peace; it is a joyous reminder. For if 
he speaks of the Kingdom of God, the King is more than 
the Kingdom. It is the Kingdom, the rule, of the God 
whom Jesus teaches us to trust and to love. The Father 
is supreme. But that has more aspects than one. If 
our Father is supreme for us, he is supreme over us. 
Jesus emphasizes the will of God — God's commandment 
against man's tradition, God's will against man's notions 
(Mark vii. 8). What a source of rest and peace to him is 
the thought of God's will! When Dante writes: "And 
His will is our peace," it is the thought of Jesus. And at 
the same time God's judgments are as real to Jesus' 
mind. "I will tell you," he says, "whom to fear, God — 
yes, fear him!" (Luke xii. 5). He feels the tenderness 
and the awfulness of God at once. 

In speaking of God, it is noticeable that Jesus chiefly 
emphasizes God's interest in the individual, as giving 
the real clue to God's nature. On the whole, there is 
very little even implied, still less explicit, in the Gospels, 
about God as the great architect of Nature — hardly any- 
thing on the lines familiar to us in the Psalms and in 
Isaiah — "The sea is his, and he made it; and his hands 
formed the dry land" (Psalm xcv. 5) — "He taketh up 
the isles as a very little thing" (Isaiah xl. 15). There 
is little of this in the Gospels; yet it is implied in the 
affair of the storm (Matt. viii. 26). The disciples in 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 93 

their anxiety wake him. He does not understand their 
fear. Whose sea is it? Whose wind is it? Whose chil- 
dren are you? Cannot you trust your Father to control 
his wmd and his sea? Of course it is possible that he 
said more about God as the Author of Nature than our 
fragmentary reports give us; but it may be that it is 
because the emphasis on God's care and love for the 
individual is hardest to believe and at the same time 
best gives the real value of God, that Jesus uses it so 
much. Perhaps the Great Artificer is too far away for 
our minds. He is too busy, we think; and yet, after all, 
if God is so great, why should he be so busy? If he is a 
real Father, why should not he be at leisure for his chil- 
dren? He is, says Jesus; a friend has leisure for his 
friends, and a father for his children; and God, Jesus 
suggests, always has leisure for you. 

The great emphasis with Jesus falls on the love of 
God. Thus he tells the story of the impossible creditor 
with two debtors (Luke vii. 42). One owed him ten 
pounds, and the other a hundred. When they had noth- 
ing to pay, they both came to him and told him so. The 
ordinary creditor, at the very best, would say: 'Well, I 
suppose I must put it down as a bad debt.' 5 Jesus says 
that this creditor took up quite another attitude. He 
smiled and said to his two troubled friends: "Is that all? 
Don't let anything like that worry you. What is that 
between you and me?' 5 He forgave them the debt with 
such a charm (echarisato) , Jesus says, that they both 
loved him. One feels that the end of the story must be, 
that they both paid him and loved him all the more for 
taking the money. What a delightful story of charm, 
and friendship and forgiveness! And it is a true picture 



94 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

of God, Jesus would have us believe, of God's forgive- 
ness and the response it wakes in men. 

If we do not definitely set our minds to assimilate 
the ideas of Jesus, we shall make too little of the heart 
of God. With Jesus this is the central and crucial reality. 
He emphasizes the generosity of God. God makes his 
sun rise on the good and on the bad; he sends rain on 
the just and the unjust (Matt. v. 45). God's flowers are 
just as beautiful in the bad man's garden. God knows 
what his child needs, and gives it, whether it is a very 
good child or a very bad one. The Father is the same 
great wise Friend in either case. The peacemakers are 
recognized as the children of God, because of their fam- 
ily likeness to God (Matt. v. 9). They come among 
people, and find them in discord with one another, and 
their presence stills that; or they come into a man's life, 
when it is all in disorder and pain, and they bring peace 
there. They may not quite know it, but they do these 
things almost without meaning to do them. And Jesus 
says that this is a family likeness by which men know 
they are God's children. But it is not every teacher, 
pagan or Christian, who lays such stress on God's gift 
of peace, or is so sure of it. He uses Hosea's great saying 
about God — "I will have mercy and not sacrifice" (Hosea 
vi. 6), as giving the truth about God. Matthew represents 
him as quoting it twice (Matt. ix. 13, xii. 7) ; and we can 
well believe that he found in it the real spirit of God 
and often referred to it. His own heart has taken him 
to the tenderest of the utterances of the Old Testament 
spoken by the most suffering of the Prophets. "Love 
your enemies," he says (Matt. v. 44); yes, for then you 
will be the real children of God. Or he speaks of the 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 95 

great patience of God, how God gives every man all the 
time and all the chance that he needs — sometimes, he 
half suggests^ even a little more. Look at the parable 
of the fig tree, how the gardener pleads for the tree, begs 
and obtains another chance for it (Luke xiii. 8) ; that is 
like God, says Jesus. 

It is easy enough to talk in a vague way about the 
love of God. But the love of God implies surely the 
individual; love has little content indeed if its object 
is merely a collective noun, an abstract, a concept. But 
that God loves individual men is very difficult for us to 
believe in earnest. The real crux comes when the ques- 
tion rises in a man's own heart, "Does God love me?'' 
Jesus says that he does, but it is very hard to believe, 
except in the company of Jesus and under his influence. 
Jesus throughout asserts and reasserts the value of the 
individual to God. Look, for example, at the picture he 
draws, when he tells of the recovery of the Lost Sheep, 
and brings out the analogy. At the end of the Book of 
Job (ch. xxxviii.) the poet carries his reader back to the 
first sight of a world new-made, and tells how God, like the 
real artist and creator — we might not have thought of 
all this, but the poet did — loves his work so much that 
he must have his friends sharing it with him. He calls 
them; he shows them the world he has made — "the 
beauty, and the wonder, and the power," as Browning 
says. The poet tells us that what followed was that 
"the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of 
God shouted for joy." The sight was so good that song 
and shout came instinctively, almost involuntarily. Is it 
not the same picture which Jesus draws of "joy in heaven 
in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that 



96 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

repenteth"? We can believe in such joy when God made 
the world; but can we believe that there was the same 
joy in the presence of God yesterday when a coolie gave 
his heart to God? Jesus does. That is the central thing, 
it seems to me, in his teaching about God — that God 
cares for the individual to an extent far beyond anything 
we could think possible. If we can wrestle with that 
central thought and assimilate it, or, as the old divines 
said, "appropriate" it, make it our own, the rest of the 
Gospel is easy. But one can never manage it except 
with the help, and in the company, of Jesus. 

Jesus goes a step further, and believes in the possi- 
bility of a man loving God and God enjoying that too. 
If he speaks of prayer must we not think he means that 
God wants it as much as his child can want it? How 
much is involved in the name "Father," which Jesus so 
uniformly gives to God? Something less than the word 
carries in the case of a human father, or more? What is 
the attitude of a father to his child? Jesus, as we have 
seen, uses this illustration to bring out God's care for the 
actual needs of his children. But is that all? What is 
the innermost thing in a father's relation to his children? 
Surely something more than the bird's instinct to feed 
her young, or to gather them under her wings (Luke 
xiii. 34). Is not one of the most real features of parent- 
hood enjoyment of the child? Do not men and women 
frankly enjoy the grappling of the little mind with big 
things? Is there not a charm, as says one of the Chris- 
tian Fathers (Minucius Felix), about the "half-words" 
that a child uses, as he learns to talk and wrestles with a 
grown-up vocabulary? About the extraordinary pictures 
he will draw of ships or cows — the quaint stories he will 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 97 

invent — the odd ways in which his gratitude and his affec- 
tion express themselves? Is it a real fatherhood where 
such things do not appeal? Jesus' language about God, his 
whole attitude to God, implies throughout that God is as 
real a Father as anybody, and it suggests that God loves 
his children the more because they are real; because 
they are not very clever; because they do make such 
queer and imperfect prayers; because, in short, they need 
him; and because they fill a place in his heart. 

We have to remark how firmly Jesus believes in his 
Gospel of God and man needing each other and finding 
each other — his "good news," as he calls it. He bases 
all on his faith in what has been called "Man's incurable 
religious instinct" — that instinct in the human heart that 
must have God — and in God's response to that instinct 
which he himself implanted, and which is no accident 
found here and missing there, but a genuine God-given 
characteristic of every man, whatever his temperament or 
his range in emotions may be, his swiftness or slowness 
of mind. The repeated parables of seed and leaven — 
the parables of vitality — again and again suggest his 
faith in his message, his conviction that God must have 
man and man must have God — that, as St. Augustine 
puts it, "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart 
knows no rest till it rests in Thee" (Conf., i. 1). That is 
the essence of the Gospel. 

How this union of the soul with God comes about, 
Jesus does not directly say, but there are many hints 
in his teaching that bear upon it. "The Kingdom of 
Heaven cometh not with observation," he said (Luke 
xvii. 20). Religious truth is not reached by "quick turns 
of self -applauding intellect," nor by demonstrations. It 



! 



98 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 



comes another way. The quiet familiarity with the deep 
true things of life, till on a sudden they are transfigured 
in the light of God, and truth is a new and glowing thing, 
independent of arguments and the strange evidence of 
thaumaturgy — this is the normal way; and Jesus holds 
by it. The great people, men of law and learning, want 
more; they want something to substantiate God's mes- 
sages from without. If Jesus comes to them with a word 
from God, can he not prove its authenticity preferably 
with "a sign from the sky" (Mark viii. 11)? For the 
signs he gives, and the evidence he suggests, are unsatis- 
factory. "And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and saith, 
'Why doth this generation seek after a sign? Verily I 
say unto you, there shall no sign be given unto this 
generation.' So he left them and went up into the ship 
again and went away." .That scene is drawn from life. 
But why no sign? In the parallel passage we read: 
'The wicked generation and adulterous seeketh a sign, 
but there shall no sign be given it, but the sign of the 
prophet Jonah'; so he left them and departed" (Matt, 
xvi. 4). The real explanation of this reference to Jonah 
is given by Luke (xi. 32), and missed or misdeveloped in 
Matthew (Matt. xii. 40). Nineveh recognized instinc- 
tively the inherent truth of Jonah's message, and re- 
pented. Truth is its own evidence — like leaven in the 
meal, like seed in the field, it does its work, and its life 
reveals it. God is known that way. When the chief 
priests demand of Jesus to be told plainly what is his 
authority (Mark xi. 27), he carries the matter a stage 
further: Was the baptism of John, he asks, from heaven, 
i.e. from God, or was it of men? Does God make His 
message clear, does He properly authenticate Himself? 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 99 

And the uneasy weighing of alternatives, summarized by 
the evangelist, leads to the answer that they could not 
tell whence it was; and Jesus rejoins that he has nothing 
to say to them about his authority. He had taken what 
we might call an easy cas — where it was evident that 
God had spoken; and this was all they made of it — they 
"could not tell." It was plain, then, either that these 
men did not recognize the obvious message of God ("the 
word of God came upon John," Luke iii. 2), or that, if 
they did recognize it, they thought it did not matter. 
For the insincere and the trivial there is no message 
from God, no truth of God — how should there be? 

If we pursue this line of thought, we can see how, in 
Jesus' opinion, a man may be sure of God and of God's 
word for him. If a man be candid with himself, if he 
face the common facts of life with seriousness and in the 
doing of duty, perplexities vanish. Such a man is pre- 
pared for the Great Fact, by faithfulness to the little 
facts, and then God dawns on him in them. This is put 
directly in the Fourth Gospel (vii. 17), and in parable in 
the Synoptists. The leaven works, till the whole is leav- 
ened; the uneasy process is over and the result achieved. 
Or, it comes more quietly still — the seed grows while the 
farmer sleeps and rises, night and day; the blade springs 
up and the ear forms on the blade, the seed grows in the 
ear; and the end is reached and God's Kingdom is a 
reality. Or, the knowledge of God comes like a lightning 
flash — sudden, illuminative, decisive. "The Son reveals" 
God to the simple, Jesus said (Matt. xi. 27). The Son of 
Man may be a disputable figure — "Whosoever speaketh a 
word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him" 
(Matt. xii. 32) — but there is no forgiveness in this world, 



100 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

or in any possible real world where God counts at all, 
for the refusal of the spirit of Truth. So he taught, and 
all history shows he was right — the refusal of truth is 
fatal. "Jesus," wrote Matthew Arnold, "never touches 
theory, but bases himself invariably upon experience." It 
is to experience that Jesus goes to authenticate his mes- 
sage. The real facts of life lead you to God, as the red 
sky, and the south wind, teach you to foretell the weather 
(Matt. xvi. 2; Luke xii. 55). 

"Eyes and ears," said the Greek thinker, Heraclitus, 
long before, "are bad witnesses for such as have bar- 
barian souls." The Pharisees discredited Jesus — he "cast 
out devils by Beelzebub." Did he, he asked, or was it 
"by the finger of God" (Luke xi. 20)? Is there no evi- 
dence of God in restored sanity? But the strength of his 
position lies in the good news for the poor (Matt. xi. 5), 
for those who labor and are heavy-laden (Matt. xi. 28) — 
news of rest and refreshment — as if the intuition of God, 
with the peace it brings, were its own proof. Truth is 
reached less by ingenuity than by intensity. To the 
simple mind, to the true heart, to the pure soul (Matt, 
v. 8), to those whose gift is peace, Truth comes flooding 
in — new light on old fact, and new light from old fact — 
and God is evident. So Jesus judged; and here again, 
before we decide for or against his view, we have to make 
sure that we know his meaning, and realize the experience 
by which he reached his thought. And then, perhaps, 
God will be more evident to us in our turn. "The King- 
dom of God cometh not with observation" (Luke xvii. 
20) — it is "within" (Luke xvii. 21); so quietly it comes, 
that we may not guess how in any particular instance 
the realization of God came to a soul; but if we are candid 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 101 



a 



nd truth-loving we can know it when it has come to 
ourselves, and we can recognize it when it comes to 
another. We can recognize it in its power and peace, we 
can see the greatness of the new knowledge in the new 
man it makes, in the new life, the man of the great spirit, 
of the great action, the man of the great quiet, the man 
who has the peace of God. 

What does the discovery of God mean? Jesus himself 
speaks of a man turning right about, being converted 
(Matt, xviii. 3) ; of the revision of all ideas, of all stand- 
ards, of all values. He gives us two beautiful pictures 
to illustrate what it means; and it repays us to linger 
over them. First, there is the Treasure Finder. He is in 
the country, digging perhaps in another man's field, or 
idling in the open; and by accident he stumbles on a 
buried treasure. Palestine was like Belgium — a land with 
a long history of wars fought on its soil by foreigners, 
Babylon or Assyria against Egypt, Ptolemies against 
Seleucids. It was the only available route for attack 
either on Egypt by land, or on Syria or Mesopotamia or 
Babylon from the Southern Mediterranean. In such a 
land when the foreign army marched through, a man 
had best hide his treasure and hope to find it again in 
better times, and again and again the secret of its place 
of burial died with him. The Treasure Finder had no 
lord of the manor to think of, no Treasury department. 
He made a great discovery, and made it initially for him- 
self, and his own — "and for joy thereof he goeth and 
selleth all that he hath and buyeth that field.' 3 We can 
see him full of his discovery, full of eagerness and trying 
to hide his inner joy, as he realizes every penny he can 
manage, and achieves the great transaction which gives 



102 



THE JESUS OF HISTORY 



him the field and the treasure. The salient points are a 
sudden and great joy, an instant resolution, a complete 
sacrifice of everything, and a life unexpectedly and in- 
finitely enriched. And so it is, says Jesus, with the 
Kingdom of God (Matt. xiii. 44). 

The Pearl Merchant is a more interesting figure. Per- 
haps we may picture him middle-aged, a trifle worn, 
somewhat silent, a man of keen eyes. He has been in 
his trade for years, and he is a master at it. By now he 
has a knowledge which years give to a man in earnest — a 
knowledge more like instinct than anything acquired. A 
glance at pearls on a table — this, and this, and this he 
will take — the other, perhaps; he would look at that one 
— the rest? he shook his head and did not look at them — 
he saw without looking. One day he is told of a pearl — a 
good one. He is not surprised, for pearls are always good 
when they are offered for sale. But again a glance is 
enough. The price? Yes, it is high, but he will take the 
pearl, but he must be allowed till evening to get the 
money. He goes away and sells his stock — the little 
collection of pearls in his wallet, representing "the ex- 
perience of a life-time," all of them good, as he very well 
knows; and he sells them for what he can get — at a loss/ 
if it must be. Yesterday's bargainer cuts down his price 
for this and that pearl, and he is taken up; he never 
expected to do so well against the old dealer, and he 
laughs. But the merchant is content, too; he has sold 
all his pearls for what they would fetch — lost money on 
them, yes, and been laughed at behind his back. But 
he owns the one pearl of great price; it is his, and he is 
satisfied. There is no reference to joy here or exultation; 
but there is the same instant recognition of the oppor- 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 103 

tunity, the same resolve, the same sacrifice, and the same 
great acquisition (Matt. xiii. 45).. 

Both parables begin with a reference to the Kingdom 
of God — to that Ride and Kingship of God, the knowl- 
edge of which makes all the difference to a man. A small 
grammatical difference points us beyond minutiae to the 
common experience of the two men. Each makes a great 
discovery, and takes action in a great and urgent resolve; 
and they are both repaid. If we are to understand the 
two parables in the sense intended by Jesus, the term 
"God" must become alive to us with all the life and power 
and love that the name implies for him. Then to grasp 
that this Father of Jesus is King — that the God of his 
thoughts, of his faith, with all the tenderness and the 
power combined that Jesus teaches us to see in Him — 
rules the universe, controls our destiny and loves us 
— this is the experience that Jesus compares with that 
of the Treasure Finder and the Pearl Merchant — worth, 
he suggests, everything a man has, and more than all. 

In passing, we may notice that these stories suggest 
that this experience may be reached in different ways. 
In the parables of the seed and the leaven he indicates 
a natural, quiet and unconscious growth, a story without 
crisis, though full of change. To the Treasure Finder the 
discovery is a surprise — how came Jesus so far into the 
minds of men as to know what a surprise God can be, 
and how joyful a surprise? The Pearl Merchant, on the 
other hand, has lived in the region where he makes his 
discovery. He is the type that lives and moves in the 
atmosphere of high and true thought, that knows what- 
soever things are pure and lovely and of good report, of 
help and use; he is no stranger to great and inspiring 



104 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

ideas. And one day, in no strange way, by no accident, 
but in the ordinary round of life, he comes on something 
that transcends all he has been seeking, all he has known 
— the One thing worth all. There is little surprise about 
it, no wild elation, but nothing is allowed to stand in the 
way of an instant entrance into the great experience — 
and the great experience is, Jesus says, God. 

To see God, to know God — that is what Jesus means 
— to get away from "all the fuss and trouble" of life 
into the presence of God, to know he is ours, to see him 
smile, to realize that he wants us to stay there, that he is 
a real Father with a father's heart, that his love is on the 
same wonderful scale as every one of his attributes, and 
in reality far more intelligible than any of them. That is 
the picture Jesus draws. The sheer incredible love of 
God, the wonderful change it means for all life — that is 
his teaching, and he encourages us, in the words of the 
Shorter Catechism, "to enjoy God for ever,' 3 as Jesus 
himself does. Those who learn his secret enjoy God in 
reality. Wherever they see God with the eyes of Jesus, 
it is joy and peace. And they realize with deepening 
emotion that this also is God's gift, as Jesus said (Luke 
viii. 10; xii. 32). 

Jesus entirely recast mankind's common ideas of holi- 
ness. It is no longer asceticism, no longer the mystical 
trance, no longer the "fussiness," with which the early 
Christian reproached the Jew, which still haunts all the 
religions of taboo and merit, and even Christianity in 
some forms. Where men think of holiness as freedom 
from sin, the negative conception reacts on life. They 
begin at the wrong end. Solomon Schechter, the great 
Jewish scholar, once said of Oxford, that "they practice 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 105 

fastidiousness there, and call it holiness." Unfortunately 
Oxford has no monopoly of that type of holiness. But 
with Jesus holiness is a much simpler and more natural 
thing — as natural as the happy, easy life of father and 
child, and it rests on mutual faith. It is Theocentric, 
positive, active rather than passive — not a state, but a 
relation and a force. Holiness with him is a living rela- 
tion with the living God. That is why the first feature in 
it that strikes us is Courage. "Be of good cheer; be not 
afraid"; that note rings through the Gospels, and how 
much it means, and has meant, in sweet temper and 
cheerfulness in the very chequered history of the Church! 
His is the great voice of Hope in the world. "The Lord 
Jesus Christ, who is our Hope," Paul said (1 Tim. i. 1). 
Even on the Cross, according to one text, Jesus said to 
the penitent thief: "Courage! To-day thou shalt be with 
me in paradise" (Luke xxiii. 43). We may not know 
where or what paradise is, but the rest is intelligible and 
splendid: "Courage; to-day thou shalt be with me." 
Look at the brave hearts the Gospel has made in every 
age; how venturesome they are! and we find the same 
venturesomeness in Jesus — for instance, as a German 
scholar emphasizes, in that episode of the daughter of 
Jairus. The messenger comes and says she is dead. Any- 
body else would stop, but Jesus goes on. That is a great 
piece of interpretation. Look again at his venturesome- 
ness in trusting the Gospel to the twelve — and to us — 
and in facing the Cross. "It was his knowledge of God," 
says Professor Peabody, "that gave him his tranquillity 
of mind." 1 



Peabody, Jesus Christ and Christian Character, p. 97. 



106 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

"Jesus," says Dr. Cairns, "said that no one ever trusted 
God enough, and that was the source of all the sin and 
tragedy.' 1 Look at his emphasis again and again on faith; 
and the language is not that of guesswork; they are the 
words of the great Son of Fact, who based himself on 
experience. "Have faith in God" (Mark xi. 22). "Be 
not afraid, only believe" (Mark v. 36). "All things are 
possible to him that believeth" (Mark ix. 23). When he 
criticizes his disciples, it is on the score of their want of 
faith — "O ye of little faith" — it has been taken as almost 
a nickname for them. In the hour of trial and danger 
they may trust to "the Spirit of your Father" (Matt. x. 
20). It is remarkable what value he attaches to faith 
even of the slightest — "faith as a grain of mustard seed" 
(Matt. xvii. 20) — it is little, but it is of the seed order, a 
living thing of the most immense vitality with the prom- 
ise of growth and usefulness in it. 

This brings us to the question of Prayer. Some of 
us, of course, do not believe very much in prayer for 
certain philosophical reasons, which perhaps, as a matter 
of fact, are not quite as sound as we think, because our 
definition of prayer is a wrong one, resting on insufficient 
experience and insufficient reflection. What is prayer? 

We shall agree that it is the act by which man definitely 
tries to relate his soul and life to God. What Jesus then 
teaches on prayer will illuminate what he means by God; 
and conversely his conception of God will throw new 
light upon the whole problem of prayer. It is plain his- 
tory that Jesus; the great Son of Fact, believed in prayer, 
told men to pray, and prayed himself. The Gospels and 
the Epistle to the Hebrews lay emphasis on his practice. 
Early in the morning he withdrew to the desert (Mark 






THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 107 

i. 35), late at night he remained on the hillside for prayer 
(Mark vi. 46), Wearied by the crowds that thronged 
him, he kept apart and continued in prayer. He prays 
before he chooses the disciples (Luke vi. 12). He gives 
thanks to God on the return of the seventy from their 
missionary journey (Luke x. 21). Prayer is associated 
with the confession of Csesarea Philippi (Luke ix. 18), 
with the Mount of Transfiguration (Luke ix. 29), with 
Gethsemane (Luke xxii. 41). The writer to the Hebrews 
speaks of his "strong crying and tears" (Heb. v. 7) in 
prayer. The Gospels even mention what we should call 
his unanswered prayers. The prayer before the calling 
of the Twelve does not exclude Judas; and the cup does 
not pass in spite of the prayer in Gethsemane. It is as if 
we had something to learn from the unanswered prayers 
of our Master. Certainly the content of the Gospel for 
us would have been poorer if they had been answered in 
our sense of the word; and this fact, taken with his own 
teaching on prayer, and his own submission to the Father's 
will, may help us over some of our difficulties. But Je^us 
had no doubt or fear about prayer being answered. "Ask, 
and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, 
and it shall be opened unto you" (Luke xi. 9) — are not 
ambiguous statements in the least; and they come from 
one "who based himself on experience.' 3 It is worth 
thinking out that the experience of Jesus lies behind his 
recommendation of prayer. All his clear-eyed knowledge 
of God speaks in these plain sentences. 

"As he was praying, they ask him, Teach us to pray, 
as John also taught his disciples" (Luke xi. 1). It looks 
as if at times his disciples caught him at prayer or even 
overheard him, and felt that here was prayer that took 



108 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

them out beyond all they had ever known of prayer. 
There were men whom John had taught to pray; was it 
they who asked Jesus to teach them over again? There 
may have been some of them who had learnt the Pharisee's 
way in prayer, and some who stuck to the simpler way 
they had been taught in childhood. In each case the old 
ways were outgrown. 

We can put together what he taught them. In the 
first place, the thing must be real and individual — the 
first requirement always with Jesus. The public prayer 
of ostentation is out of the reckoning; it is nothing. 
Jesus chooses the quiet and solitary place for his inter- 
course with his Father. The real prayer is to the Father 
in secret — His affair. And it will be earnest beyond what 
most of us think. We are so familiar faith Gospel and 
parable that we do not take in the strenuousness of Jesus' 
way in prayer. The importunate widow (Luke xviii. 2) 
and the friend at midnight (Luke xi. 5) are his types of 
insistent and incessant earnestness. Do you, he asks, 
pray with anything like their determination to be heard? 
The knock at the door and the pleading voice continue 
till the request is granted — in each case by a reluctant 
giver. But God is not reluctant, Jesus says, though God, 
too, will choose his own time to answer (Luke xviii. 7). It 
does not mean the mechanical reiteration of the heathen 
(Matt. vi. 7) — not at all, that is not the business of pray- 
ing; but the steady earnest concentration on the purpose, 
with the deeper and deeper clarification of the thought as 
we press home into God's presence till we get there. It 
was so that he prayed, we may be sure. It is not idly that 
prayer has been called "the greatest task of the Christian 
man"; it will not be an easy thing, but a strenuous. 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 109 

One part of the difficulty of prayer is recognized by 
Jesus over and over again. Men do not really quite be- 
lieve that they will be answered — they are "of little faith." 
But he tells them with emphasis, in one form of words 
and another, driving it home into them, that "all things 
are possible with God" (Mark x. 27) — "have faith in 
God" (Mark xi. 22). One can imagine how he fixes them 
with the familiar steady gaze, pauses, and then with the 
full weight of his personality in his words, and meaning 
them to give to his words the full value he intends, says: 
"Have faith in God.' 5 To see him and to hear him must 
have given that faith of itself. If the friend in the house 
to your knowledge has the loaves, you will knock till you 
get them; and has not God the gifts for you that you 
need? Is he short of the power to help, or is it the will 
to help that is wanting in God? 

It all comes back to Jesus' conception of God. Here, 
as elsewhere, we sacrifice far more than we dream by our 
lazy way of using his words without making the effort 
to give them his connotation. To turn again to passages 
already quoted, will a father give his son a serpent instead 
of the fish for which he asks, a stone for bread? It is un- 
thinkable; God — will God do less? It all goes back again 
to the relation of father and child, to the love of God; 
only into the thought Jesus puts a significance which we 
have not character or love enough to grasp. 'Your 
Father knoweth that ye have need of these things," he 
says about the matters that weigh heaviest with us 
(Luke xii. 30). Even if we suppose Luke's reference to 
the Father giving the Holy Spirit to those who ask (Luke 
xi. 13), to owe something to the editor's hand — it was an 
editor with some Christian experience — it is clear that 



110 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

Jesus steadily implies that the heavenly Father has better 
things than food and clothing for his children. How much 
of a human father is available for his children? Then 
will not the heavenly Father, Jesus suggests, give on a 
larger scale, and give Himself; in short, be available for 
the least significant of His own children in all His fulness 
and all His Fatherhood? And even if they do not ask, 
because they do not know their need, will he not answer 
the prayers that others, who do know, make for them? 
Jesus at all events made a practice of intercession — "I 
prayed for thee," he said to Peter (Luke xxii. 32) — and 
the writers of the New Testament feel that it is only 
natural for Jesus, Risen, Ascended, and Glorified, to 
make intercession for us still (Rom. vhi. 34; Heb. vii. 25). 

We have again to think out what God's Fatherhood 
implies and carries with it for Jesus. 

''The recurrence of the sweet and deep name, Father, 
unveils the secret of his being. His heart is at rest in 
God." 1 Rest in God is the very note of all his being, of 
all his teaching — the keynote of all prayer in his thought. 
"Our Father, who art in heaven," our prayers are to 
begin — and perhaps they are not to go on till we realize 
what we are saying in that great form of speech. It is 
certain that as these words grow for us into the full 
stature of their meaning for Jesus, we shall understand 
in a more intimate way what the whole Gospel is in 
reality. 

The writer to the Hebrews has here an interesting 
suggestion for us. Using the symbolism of the Hebrew 
religion and its tabernacle, he compares Jesus to the 

1 H. R. Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ, 
p. 399. 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 111 

High Priest, but Jesus, he says, does not enter into the 
holiest alone. "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to 
enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and 
living way, which he hath consecrated for us . . . let us 
draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith" 
(Heb. x. 19). In the previous chapter he discards the 
symbol and "speaks things" — "Christ is not entered into 
the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of 
the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the 
presence of God for us" (Heb. ix. 24). There he touches 
what has been the faith of the Church throughout — 
that in Christ we reach the presence of God. Without 
saying so much in so many words, Jesus implies this in all 
his attitude to prayer. God is there, and God loves you, 
and loves to have you speak with him. No one has ever 
believed this very much outside the radius of Christ's 
person and influence. It is, when we give the words full 
weight, an essentially Christian faith, and it depends on 
our relation to Jesus Christ. 

Jesus was quite explicit with his friends in telling them 
they did not know what to ask, but he showed them him- 
self what they should ask. "Seek ye first the kingdom of 
God and his righteousness" (Matt. vi. 33), he says, and 
tells us to pray for the forgiveness of our sins and for de- 
liverance from evil. Pray, too, "Thy kingdom come.' 
"Pray ye the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth 
laborers into his harvest" (Matt. ix. 38). This is 
perhaps the only place where he asked his disciples to 
pray for his great work. Identification with God's pur- 
poses — identification with the individual needs of those 
we love and those we ought to love — identification with 
the world's sin and misery — these seem to be his canons 



112 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

of prayer for us, as for himself. For both in what he 
teaches others and in what he does himself, he makes it a 
definite prerequisite of all prayer that we say: 'Thy 
will be done." Prayer is essentially dedication, deeper 
and fuller as we use it more and come more into the 
presence of God. Obedience goes with it; "we must 
cease to pray or cease to disobey," one or the other. If 
we are half-surrendered, we are not very bright about 
our prayers, because we do not quite believe that God 
will really look after the things about which we are 
anxious. We must indeed go back to what Jesus said 
about God; we had better even leave off praying for a 
moment till we see what he says, and then begin again 
with a clearer mind. 

"Ask, and ye shall receive,' 5 he says; and if we have 
no obedience, or love, or faith, or any of the great things 
that make prayer possible, he suggests that we can ask 
for them and have them. The Gospel gives us an illus- 
tration in the man who prayed: "Lord, I believe; help 
thou mine unbelief" (Mark ix. 24). But it is plain we 
have to understand that we are asking for great things, 
and it is to them rather than to the obvious little things 
that Jesus directs our thoughts. Not away from the little 
things, for if God is a real Father he will wish to have his 
children talk them over with him — "little things please lit- 
tle minds,' 5 yes, and great minds when the little minds 
are dear to them — but not little things all the time. 
There is a variant to the saying about seeking first the 
Kingdom of Heaven, which Clement of Alexandria pre- 
serves. Perhaps it is a mere slip, but God, it has been 
said, can use misquotations; and Clement's quotation, or 
misquotation, certainly represents the thought of Jesus, 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS UPON GOD 113 

and it may give us a hint for our own practice: "Ask," 
saith he, "the great things, and the little things will be 
added unto you." 

The object of Jesus was to induce men to base all life 
on God. Short-range thinking, like the rich fool's, may 
lead to our forgetting God; but Jesus incessantly lays 
the emphasis on the thought-out life; and that, in the 
long run, means a new reckoning with God. That is 
what Jesus urges — that we should think life out, that we 
should come face to face with God and see him for what 
he is, and accept him. He means us to live a life utterly 
and absolutely based on God — life on God's lines of peace- 
making and ministry, the "denial of self," a complete for- 
getfulness of self in surrender to God, obedience to God, 
faith in God, and the acceptance of the sunshine of God's 
Fatherhood. He means us to go about things in God's way 
— forgiving our enemies, cherishing kind thoughts about 
those who hate us or despise us or use us badly (Matt. v. 
44), praying for them. This takes us right back into the 
common world, where we have to live in any case; and it 
is there that he means us to live with God — not in trance, 
but at work, in the family, in business, shop, and street, 
doing all the little things and all the great things that God 
wants us to do, and glad to do them just because we are 
his children and he is our Father. Above all, he would 
have us "think like God" (Mark viii. 33); and to reach 
this habit of "thinking like God," we have to live in the 
atmosphere of Jesus, "with him" (Markiii. 14). All this 
new life he made possible for us by being what he was — 
once again a challenge to re-explore Jesus. "The way to 
faith in God and to love for man," said Dr. Cairns at 
Mohonk, "is as of old to come nearer to the living Jesus." 



CHAPTER VI 



JESUS AND MAN 



When, on his last journey, Jesus came in sight of Jeru- 
salem, Luke tells us that he wept (Luke xix. 41). There 
is an obvious explanation of this in the extreme tension 
under which he was living — everything turned upon the 
next few days, and everything would be decided at Jeru- 
salem; but while he must have felt this, it cannot have 
been the cause of his weeping. Nor should we look for it 
altogether in the appeal which a great city makes to 
emotion. 

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by 
A sight so touching in its majesty. 

Yet it was not the architecture that so deeply moved 
Jesus; the temple, which was full in view, was compara- 
tively new and foreign. There is little suggestion in the 
Gospels that Art meant anything to him, perhaps it 
meant little to the writers. As for the temple, he found 
it "a den of thieves" (Luke xix. 46); and he prophesied 
that it would be demolished, and of all its splendid build- 
ings, its goodly stones and votive offerings, which so 
much impressed his disciples, not one stone would be 
left upon another stone (Mark xiii. 2; Luke xxi. 5). But 
the traditions of Jerusalem wakened thoughts in him of 
the story of his people, thoughts with a tragic color. 
Jerusalem was the place where prophets were killed (Luke 

114 



JESUS AND MAN 115 

xiii. 34), the scene and center, at once, of Israel's deepest 
emotions, highest hopes, and most awful failures. "O 
Jerusalem! Jerusalem!" he had said in sadness as he 
thought of Israel's holy city, "which killest the prophets 
and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often 
would L have gathered thy children together, as a hen 
doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would 
not!" (Luke xiii. 34). 

And now he is in sight of Jerusalem. The city and 
the temple suddenly meet his view, as he reaches the 
height, and he is deeply moved. Any reflective mind 
might well have been stirred by the thought of the masses 
of men gathered there. Nothing is so futile as an arith- 
metical numbering of people, for after a certain point 
figures paralyze the imagination, and after that they tell 
the mind little or nothing. But here was actually assem- 
bled the Jewish people, coming in swarms from all the 
world, for the feast; here was Judaism at its most pious; 
here was the pilgrim center with all it meant of aspira- 
tion and blindness, of simple folly and gross sin. The 
sight of the city — the doomed city, as he foresaw — the 
thought of his people, their zeal for God and their aliena- 
tion from God — it all comes over him at once, and, with 
a sudden rush of feeling, he apostrophizes Jerusalem — 
"If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy 
day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But now 
they are hid from thine eyes. . . . Thou knewest not the 
time of thy visitation!" (Luke xix. 42-44). 

It is quite plain from the Gospels that crowds had 
always an appeal for Jesus. At times he avoided them; 
but when they came about him, they claimed him and 
possessed him. Over and over again, we read of his 



116 



THE JESUS OF HISTORY 



pity for them — "he saw a great multitude and was moved 
with compassion toward them" (Matt. xiv. 14) — of his 
thought for their weariness and hunger, his reflection 
that they might "faint by the way" on their long home- 
ward journeys (Mark viii. 3), and his solicitude about 
their food. Whatever modern criticism makes of the 
story of his feeding multitudes, it remains that he was 
markedly sensitive to the idea of hunger. Jairus is re- 
minded that his little girl will be the better for food (Mark 
v. 43). The rich are urged to make feasts for the poor, 
the maimed and the blind (Luke xiv. 12). The owner of 
the vineyard, in the parable, pays a day's wage for an 
hour's work, when an hour was all the chance that the un- 
employed laborer could find (Matt. xx. 9). No sanctity 
could condone for the devouring of widows' houses (Matt, 
xxiii. 14). 

The great hungry multitudes haunt his mind. The 
story of the rich young ruler shows this (Mark x. 17-22). 
Here was a man of birth and education, whose face and 
whose speech told of a good heart and conscience — a 
man of charm, of the impulsive type that appealed to 
Jesus. Jesus "looked on him," we read. The words 
recall Plato's picture of Socrates looking at the jailer, 
how "he looked up at him in his peculiar way, like a bull" 
— the old man's prominent eyes were fixed on the fellow, 
glaring through the brows above them, and Socrates' 
friends saw them and remembered them when they thought 
of the scene. As Jesus' eyes rested steadily on this young 
man, the disciples saw in them an expression they knew 
— "Jesus, looking on him, loved him." Their talk. was of 
eternal life; and, no doubt to his surprise, Jesus asked the 
youth if he had kept the commandments; how did he stand 



JESUS AND MAN 117 

as regarded murder, theft, adultery? The steady gaze fol- 
lowed the youth's impetuous answer, and then came the 
recommendation to sell all that he had and give to the 
poor — "and, Come! Follow me!" At this, we read in a 
fragment of the Gospel according to the Hebrews (preserved 
by Origen), "the rich man began to scratch his head, and 
it did not please him. And the Lord said to him, 'How 
say est thou, "The law I have kept and the prophets?" 
For it is written in the law, "thou shalt love thy neighbor 
as thyself"; and behold! many who are thy brethren, sons 
of Abraham, are clad in filth and dying of hunger, and 
thy house is full of many good things, and nothing at all 
goes out from it to them.' And he turned and said to 
Simon, his disciple, who was sitting beside him: 'Simon, 
son of John, it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's 
eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of 
Heaven.' We need not altogether reject this variant of 
the story. 

But it was more than the physical needs of the multi- 
tude that appealed to Jesus. "Man's Unhappiness, as I 
construe,' 5 says Teufelsdrockh in Sartor Resartus, 
"comes of his Greatness, it is because there is an Infinite 
in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury 
under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and 
Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe under- 
take, in joint-stock company, to make one Shoeblack 
happy?" We read in a passage, which it is true, is largely 
symbolic, that one of Jesus' quotations from the Old 
Testament was that "Man shall not live by bread alone" 
(Luke iv. 4). Hunger is a real thing — horribly real; but 
it is comparatively easy to deal with, and man has deeper 
needs. The Shoeblack, according to Teufelsdrockh, wants 



118 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

"God's infinite universe altogether to himself "—in the 
simpler words of Jesus, he is never happy till he says, "I 
will arise and go to my Father" (Luke xv. 18). 

This craving for the Father the men of Jesus' day 
tried to fill with the law; and, when the law failed to 
satisfy it, they had nothing further to suggest, except 
their fixed idea that "God heareth not sinners" (John 
ix. 31). They despaired of the great masses and left 
them alone. They did not realize, as Jesus did, that the 
Father also craves for his children. When Jesus saw the 
simpler folk thus forsaken, the picture rose in his mind 
of sheep, worried by dogs or wolves, till they fell, worn 
out — sheep without a shepherd (Matt. ix. 36). Every 
one remembers the shepherd of the parable who sought 
the one lost sheep until he found it, and how he brought 
it home on his shoulders (Luke xv. 5). But there is 
another parable, we might almost say, of ninety and nine 
lost sheep — a parable, not developed, but implied in the 
passage of Matthew, and it is as significant as the other, 
for our Good Shepherd 1 has to ask his friends to help him 
in this case. The appeal that lay in the sheer misery and 
helplessness of masses of men was one of the foundations 
of the Christian Church. 

It is worth noticing that Jesus stands alone in refus- 
ing to despair of the greater part of mankind. Contempt 
was in his eyes the unpardonable sin (Matt. v. 22). How 
swift and decisive is his anger with those who make others 
stumble! (Luke xvii. 2). The parable of the lost sheep 

1 The Good Shepherd, by the way, is a phrase from the Fourth 
Gospel (John x. 11), but we think most often of the Good Shepherd 
as carrying the sheep, and that comes from Luke, and is in all 
likelihood nearer the parable of Jesus, 



JESUS AND MAN 119 

reveals what he held to be God's feeling for the hopeless 
man; and, as we have seen, his constant aim is to lead 
men to "think like God. 55 The lost soul matters to God. 
He sums up his own work in the world in much the same 
language as he uses about the shepherd in the parable: 
'The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which 
is lost" (Luke xix. 10). The taunt that he was the "friend 
of publicans and sinners' 5 really described what he was 
and wished to be (Luke vii. 34). God was their Heavenly- 
Father. The sight, then, of the masses of his country- 
men, like worried sheep, worn, scattered, lost, and hope- 
less, waked in him no shade of doubt — on the contrary, it 
was further proof to him of the soundness of his message. 
Changing his simile, he told his disciples that the harvest 
was great, but the laborers few, and he asked them to 
pray the Lord of the harvest to thrust forth laborers into 
His harvest (Matt. ix. 38). The very name "Lord of the 
harvest" implies faith in God's competence and under- 
standing. From the first, he seems to have held up 
before his followers that this wide service was to be their 
work — "Come ye after me," he said, "and I will make 
you to become fishers of men" (Mark i. 17) — men, who 
should really "catch men" (Luke v. 10). 

Like all for whom the world has had a meaning, Jesus, 
as we have seen, accepted the necessary conditions of 
man's life. Human misery and need were widespread, 
but God's Fatherhood was of compass fully as wide, and 
Jesus relied upon it. "Your heavenly Father knows," he 
said (Matt. vi. 32), and "with God all things are possible" 
(Mark x. 27). The very miseries of the oppressed and 
hopeless people added grounds to his confidence. People 
who had touched bottom in sounding the human spirit's 



120 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

capacity for misery, were for him the "ripe harvest" 
(Matt. ix. 37), only needing to be gathered (Mark iv. 29). 
He understood them, and he knew that he had the heal- 
ing for all their troubles. With full assurance of the 
truth of his words, he cried: "Come unto me all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" 
(Matt. xi. 28). He spoke of a rest which careless fa- 
miliarity obscures for us. What understanding and sym- 
pathy he shows, when he adds: "My yoke is easy, and my 
burden is light!" Misery, poverty and hunger, he had 
found, taught men to see realities. The hungry, at least, 
were not likely to mistake a stone for bread — they had a 
ready test for it, on which they could rely. Poverty 
threw open the road to the Kingdom of God. The clear- 
ing away of all temporary satisfactions, of all that cloaked 
the soul's deepest needs, prepared men for real relations 
with the greatest Reality — with God. So that Jesus 
boldly said: "Blessed are ye poor"; "Blessed are ye that 
hunger now"; "Blessed are ye that weep now" (Luke 
vi. 20, 21); but he had no idea that they were always to 
weep. If it was his to care for men's hunger, it was not 
likely that he would have no comfort for their tears — 
"Ye shall find rest unto your souls" (Matt. xi. 29) — 
"They shall be comforted" (Matt. v. 4). 

It was in large part upon the happiness which he 
was to bring to the poor that Jesus based his claim to be 
heard. There is little reasonable ground for doubt that 
he healed diseases. Of course we cannot definitely pro- 
nounce upon any individual case reported; the diagnosis 
might be too hasty, and the trouble other than was sup- 
posed; but it is well known that such healings do occur — 
and that they occurred in Jesus' ministry, we can well 



JESUS AND MAN 121 

believe. So when he was challenged as to his credentials, 
he pointed to misery relieved; and the culmination of 
everything, the crowning feature of his work, he found 
in his "good news for the poor." The phrase he borrowed 
from Isaiah (lxi. 1), but he made it his own — the splendid 
promises in Isaiah for "the poor, the broken-hearted, 
captives, blind and bruised,' 5 appealed to him. Time 
has laid its hand upon his word, and dulled its freshness. 
"Gospel" and "evangelical" are no longer words of sheer 
happiness like Jesus 5 "good news" — they are technical 
terms, used in handbooks and in controversy; while for 
Jesus the "good news for the poor" was a new word of 
delight and inspiration. 

The center in all the thoughts of Jesus, as we have to 
remind ourselves again and again, is God. If, as Dr. 
D. S. Cairns puts it, "Jesus Christ is the great believer 
in man," it is — if we are reading him aright at all — 
because God believes in man. Let us remind ourselves 
often of that. "Thou hast made us for Thyself," said 
Augustine in the famous sentence, of which we are apt 
to emphasize the latter half, "and our heart knows no 
rest till it rests in Thee" (Confessions, i. 1). Jesus 
would have us emphasize the former clause as well, and 
believe it. The keynote of his whole story is God's 
love; the Father is a real father — strange that one should 
have to write the small / to get the meaning ! All that 
Jesus has taught us of God, we must bring to bear on 
man. For it is hard to believe in man — "What is man 
that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest 
set thine heart upon him?" quotes the author of Job in a 
great ironical passage (Job vii. 17; from Psalm viii. 4). 
The elements and the stars come over us, as they came over 



122 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

George Fox in the Vale of Beavor; — what is man? Can 
one out of fifteen hundred millions of human beings 
living on one planet matter to God, when there are so 
many planets and stars, and there have been so many- 
generations? Can he matter? It all depends on how 
we conceive of God. Here it is essential to give all the 
meaning to the term "God" that Jesus gave to it, to 
believe in God as Jesus believed in God, if we are to 
understand the fulness of Jesus' "good news.' 3 It all 
depends on God — on whether Jesus was right about God; 
and after all on Jesus himself. "A thing of price is man," 
wrote Synesius about 410 a. d., * because for him Christ 
died." The two things go together — Jesus' death and 
Jesus' Theocentric thought of man. 

It is a familiar criticism of idealists and other young 
hearts, that it is easy to idealize what one does not know. 
Omne ignotum pro magnifico is the old epigram of Tacitus. 
It is not every believer in man, nor every "Friend of 
man," who knows men as Jesus did. Like Burns and 
Carlyle and others who have interpreted man to us to 
some purpose, he grew up in the home of laboring people. 
He was a working man himself, a carpenter. He must 
have learnt his carpentry exactly as every boy learns 
it, by hammering his fingers instead of the nail, sawing 
his own skin instead of the wood — and not doing it again. 
He knew what it was to have an aching back and sweat 
on the face; how hard money is to earn, and how quickly 
it goes. He makes it clear that money is a temptation 
to men, and a great danger; but he never joins the moral- 
ists and cranks in denouncing it. He always talks sense 
— if the expression is not too lowly to apply to him. He 
sees what can be done with money, what a tool it can be 



JESUS AND MAN 123 

in a wise man's hands — how he can make friends "by 
means of the mammon of unrighteousness" (Luke xvi. 9), 
for example, by giving unexpectedly generous wages to 
men who missed their chances (Matt. xx. 15), by feeding 
Lazarus at the gate, and perhaps by having his sores 
properly attended to (Luke xvi. 20). That he understood 
how pitifully the loss of a coin may affect a household of 
working people, one of his most beautiful parables bears 
witness (Luke xv. 8-10). With work he had no quarrel. 
He draws many of his parables from labor, and he implies 
throughout that it is the natural and right thing for man. 
To be holy in his sense, a man need not leave his work. 
Clement of Alexandria, in his famous saying about the 
ploughman continuing to plough, and knowing God as 
he ploughs, and the seafaring man, sticking to his ship 
and calling on the heavenly pilot as he sails, is in the 
vein of Jesus. 1 There were those whom he called to leave 
all, to distribute their wealth, and to follow him; but 
he chose them (Mark iii. 13, 14); it was not his one 
command for all men (cf. Mark v. 19). But, as we 
shall shortly see, it is implied by his judgments of men 
that he believed in work and liked men who "put their 
backs into it" — their backs, eyes, and their brains too. 

Pain, the constant problem of man, and perhaps 
more, of woman — of unmarried woman more espe- 
cially — he never discussed as modern people discuss it. 
He never made light of pain any more than of poverty; 
he understood physical as well as moral distress. Nor 
did he, like some of his contemporaries and some modern 
people, exaggerate the place of pain in human experience. 



1 Clement, Protrepticus, 100, 3, 4. 



124 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

He shared pain, he sympathized with suffering; and his 
understanding of pain, and, above all, his choice of pain, 
taught men to reconsider it and to understand it, and 
altered the attitude of the world toward it. His tender- 
ness for the suffering of others taught mankind a new 
sympathy, and the nosokomeion, the hospital for the 
sick, was one of the first of Christian institutions to rise, 
when persecution stopped and Christians could build. 
"And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, 
and he healed them," says Matthew (xxi. 14) in a mem- 
orable phrase. I have heard it suggested that it was 
irregular for them to come into the temple courts; but 
they gravitated naturally to Jesus. 

The mystic is never quite at leisure for other people's 
feelings and sufferings; he is essentially an individu- 
alist; he must have his own intercourse with God, and 
other people's affairs are apt to be an interruption, an 
impertinence. "I have not been thinking of the com- 
munity; I have been thinking of Christ," said a Bengali 
to me, who was wavering between the Brahmo Samaj 
and Christianity. The blessed Angela of Foligno was 
rather glad to be relieved of her husband and children, 
who died and left her leisure to enjoy the love of God. 
All this is quite unlike the real spirit of the historical 
Jesus. "Himself took our infirmities and bare our 
sicknesses," was a phrase of Isaiah that came instinctively 
to the minds of his followers (Matt. viii. 17, roughly after 
Isaiah liii. 4). Perhaps when we begin to understand 
what is meant by the Incarnation, we may find that om- 
nipotence has a great deal more to do than we have 
supposed with natural sympathy and the genius for 
entering into the sorrows and sufferings of other people. 



JESUS AND MAN 125 

One side of the work of Jesus must never be forgotten. 
His attitude to woman has altered her position in the 
world. No one can study society in classical antiquity 
or in non-Christian lands with any intimacy and not 
realize this. Widowhood in Hinduism, marriage among 
Mohammedans— they are proverbs for the misery of 
women. Even the Jew still prays: "Blessed art thou, 
O Lord our God! King of the Universe, who hast not 
made me a woman/ 2 The Jewish woman has to be 
grateful to God, because He "hath made me according to 
His will" — a thanksgiving with a different note, as the 
modern Jewess, Amy Levy, emphasized in her brilliant 
novel, where her heroine, very like herself, corrected 
her prayerbook to make it more explicit — "cursed art 
Thou, O Lord our God! Who hast made me a woman.' 5 
Paul must have known these Jewish prayers, for he 
emphasized that in Christ there is neither male nor 
female (Gal. iii. 28). Paul had his views — the familiar 
old ways of Tarsus inspired them 1 — as to woman's dress 
and deportment, especially the veil; but he struck the 
real Christian note here, and laid stress on the fact of 
what Jesus had done and is doing for women. There 
is no reference made by Jesus to woman that is not 
respectful and sympathetic; he never warns men against 
women. Even the most degraded women find in him 
an amazing sympathy; for he has the secret of being 
pure and kind at the same time — his purity has not to be 
protected; it is itself a purifying force. He draws some 
of his most delightful parables from woman's work, as we 

1 The more or less contemporary Greek orator, Dio Chrysostom, 
refers to the old-fashioned ways of the Tarsiots, especially mention- 
ing their insistence on women wearing veils. 



126 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

have seen. It is recorded how, when he spoke of the 
coming disaster of Jerusalem, he paused to pity poor 
pregnant women and mothers with little babies in those 
bad times (Luke xxi. 23; Matt. xxiv. 19). Critics have 
remarked on the place of woman in Luke's Gospel, and 
some have played with fancies as to the feminine sources 
whence he drew his knowledge — did the women who 
ministered to Jesus, Joanna, for instance, the wife of 
Chuza (Luke viii. 3), tell him these illuminative stories 
of the Master? In any case Jesus' new attitude to 
woman is in the record; and it has so reshaped the thought 
of mankind, and made it so hard to imagine anything 
else, that we do not readily grasp what a revolution he 
made — here as always by referring men's thoughts back 
to the standard of God's thoughts, and supporting what 
he taught by what he was. 

Mark has given us one of our most familiar pictures 
of Jesus sitting with a little child on his knee and "in the 
crook of his arm." (The Greek participle which gives 
this in Mark ix. 36 and x. 16 is worth remembering — it is 
vivid enough.) Mothers brought their children to him, 
"that he should put his hands on them and pray" (Matt, 
xix. 13). Matthew (xxi. 15) says that children took 
part in the Triumphal Entry; and Jesus, clear as he was 
how little the Hosannas of the grown people meant, 
seems to have enjoyed the children's part in the strange 
scene. Classical literature, and Christian literature of 
those ages, offer no parallel to his interest in children. 
The beautiful words, "suffer little children to come unto 
me," are his, and they are characteristic of him (Matt, 
xix. 14); and he speaks of God's interest in children 
(Matt, xviii. 14) — once more a reference of everything 



JESUS AND MAN 127 

to God to get it in its true perspective. How Jesus 
likes children! — for their simplicity (Luke xviii. 17), 
.their intuition, their teachableness, we say. But was 
it not, perhaps, for far simpler and more natural reasons 
— just because they were children, and little, and de- 
lightful? We forget his little brothers and sisters, or w T e 
eliminate them for theological purposes. 

Jesus lays quite an unexpected emphasis on sheer 
tenderness — on kindness to neighbor and stranger, 
the instinctive humanity that helps men, if it be only 
by the swift offer of a cup of cold water (Matt. x. 42). 
The Good Samaritan came as a surprise to some of his 
hearers (Luke x. 30). "It is our religion," said a Hindu 
to a missionary, to explain why he and other Hindus 
did not help to rescue a fainting man from the railway 
tracks, nor even offer water to restore him, when the mis- 
sionary had hauled him on to the platform unaided. 
Not so the religion of Jesus — "bear ye one another's 
burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ," wrote Paul 
(Gal. vi. 2) — "pursue hospitality" (Rom. xii. 13; the 
very word runs through the Epistles of the New Testa- 
ment). And as we shall see in a later chapter, the Last 
Judgment itself turns on whether a man has kindly 
instincts or not. Matthew quotes (xii. 20) to describe 
Jesus' own tenderness the impressive phrase of Isaiah (xlii. 
3), "A bruised reed shall he not break." 

If it is urged that such things are natural to man — 
"do not even the publicans the same?" (Matt. v. 46) — 
Jesus carries the matter a long way further. "Whosoever 
shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain" (Matt. 
v. 41). The man who would use such compulsion would 
be the alien, soldier, the hireling of Herod or of Rome; and 



128 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

who would wish to cart him and his goods even one mile? 
"Go two miles," says Jesus — or, if the Syriac translation 
preserves the right reading, "Go two extra" Why? 
Well, the soldier is a man after all, and by such un- 
solicited kindness you may make a friend even of a 
government official — not always an easy thing to do 
— at any rate you can help him; God helps him; "be 
ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in 
heaven is perfect" (Matt. v. 48). Ordinary kindness 
and tenderness could hardly be urged beyond that point; 
and yet Jesus goes further still. He would have us 
pray for those that despitefully use us (Matt. v. 44) — 
and in no Pharisaic way, but with the same instinctive 
love and friendliness that he always used himself. * 'Father, 
forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 
xxiii. 34). There are religions which inculcate the tol- 
erance of wrong aiming at equanimity of mind or acqui- 
sition of merit. But Jesus implies on the contrary that 
in all this also the Christian denies himself, does not 
seek even in this way to save his own soul, but forgets all 
about it in the service of others, though he finds by and 
by, with a start, that he has saved it far more effectually 
than he could have expected (Mark viii. 35; Matt. xxv. 
37, 40). The emphasis falls on our duty of kindness 
and tenderness to all men and women, because we and 
they are alike God's children. 

With his emphasis on tenderness we may group his 
teaching on forgiveness. He makes the forgiving spirit 
an antecedent of prayer — "when ye stand praying, 
forgive, if ye have aught against any; that your Father 
also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses" 
(Mark xi. 25). "If thou bring thy gift to the altar, 



[ JESUS AND MAN 129 

and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught 
against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and 
go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and then 
come and offer thy gift" (Matt. v. 23, 24). The parable 
of the king and his debtor (Matt, xviii. 23), painfully 
true to human nature, brings out the whole matter of our 
forgiveneness of one another into the light; we are shown 
it from God's outlook. The teaching as ever is Theo- 
centric. To Peter, Jesus says that a man should be 
prepared to forgive his brother to seventy times seven 
— if anybody can keep count so far (Matt, xviii. 21-35). 
He sees how quarrels injure life, and alienate a man 
from God. Hence comes the famous saying: "Resist 
not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right 
cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matt. v. 39). He 
would have men even avoid criticism of one another 
(Matt. vii. 1-5). Epigrams are seductive, and there 
is a fascination in the dissection of character; but there 
is always a danger that a clever characterization, a witty 
label, may conclude the matter, that a possible friendship 
may be lost through the very ingenuity with which the 
man has been labelled, who might have been a friend. 
It is not a small matter in Jesus' eyes, he puts his view 
i very strongly (Matt. v. 22); and, as we must always 
remember, he bases himself on fact. We may lose a 
great deal more than we think by letting our labels 
stand between us and his words, by our habit of calling 
them paradoxes and letting them go at that. 

It is worth while to look at the type of character that 
he admires. Modern painters have often pictured 
Jesus as something of a dreamer, a longhaired, sleepy, 
abstract kind of person. What a contrast we find in the 



130 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

energy of the real Jesus — in the straight and powerful 
language which he uses to men, in the sweep and range 
of his mind, in the profundity of his insight, the drive 
and compulsiveness of his thinking, in the venturesome- 
ness of his actions. How many of the parables turn on 
energy? The real trouble with men, he seems to say, is 
again and again sheer slackness; they will not put their 
minds to the thing before them, whether it be thought 
or action. Thus, for instance, the parable of the talents 
turns on energetic thinking and decisive action; and these 
are the things that Jesus admires — in the widow who will 
have justice (Luke xviii. 2) — in the virgins who thought 
ahead and brought extra oil (Matt. xxv. 4) — in the vigorous 
man who found the treasure and made sure of it (Matt, 
xiii. 44) — in the friend at midnight, who hammered, 
hammered, hammered, till he got his loaves (Luke xi. 8) 
— in the "violent," who "take the Kingdom of Heaven by 
force" (Matt. xi. 12; Luke xvi. 16) — in the man who 
will hack off his hand to enter into life (Mark ix. 43). 
Even the bad steward he commends, because he definitely 
put his mind on his situation (Luke xvi. 8). As we shall 
see later on, indecision is one of the things that in his 
judgment will keep a man outside the Kingdom of God, 
that make him unfit for it. The matter deserves more 
study than we commonly give it. You must have a 
righteousness, he says, which exceeds the righteousness 
of the Pharisees (Matt. v. 20) — and the Pharisees were 
professionals in righteousness. His tests of discipleship 
illumine his ideal of character — Theocentric thinking — 
negation of self — the thought-out life. He will have his 
disciples count the cost, reckon their forces, calculate 
quietly the risks before them — right up to the cross 






JESUS AND MAN 131 

(Luke xiv. 27-33) — like John Bunyan in Bedford Gaol, 
where he thought things out to the pillory and thence 
to the gallows, so that, if it came to the gallows, he should 
be ready, as he says, to leap off the ladder blindfold into 
eternity. That is the energy of mind that Jesus asks of 
men, that he admires in men. 

On the other side, he is always against the life of drift, 
the half-thought-out life. There they were, he says, 
in the days of Noah, eating and drinking, marrying, 
dreaming — and the floods came and destroyed them 
(Luke xvii. 27). So ran the old familiar story, and, says 
Jesus, it is always true; men will drift and dream for ever, 
heedless of fact, heedless of God — and then ruin, life 
gone, the soul lost, the Son of Man come, and "you 
yourselves thrust out" (Luke xiii. 28, with Matt. xxv. 
10-13). It is quite striking with what a variety of im- 
pressive pictures Jesus drives home his lesson. There 
is the person who everlastingly says and does not do 
(Matt, xxiii. 3) — who promises to work and does not 
work (Matt. xxi. 28) — who receives a new idea with 
enthusiasm, but has not depth enough of nature for it to 
root itself (Mark iv. 6) — who builds on sand, the "Mr. 
Anything" of Bunyan's allegory; nor these alone, for 
Jesus is as plain on the unpunctual (Luke xiii. 25), the 
easy-going (Luke xii. 47), the sort that compromises, 
that tries to serve God and Mammon (Matt. vi. 24) — 
all the practical half-and-half people that take their bills 
quickly and write fifty, that offer God and man about 
half what they owe them of thought and character and 
action, and bid others do the same, and count themselves 
men of the world for their acuteness (Luke xvi. 1-8). 
And to do them justice, Jesus commends them; they 



132 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

have taken the exact measure of things "in their gen- 
eration." Their mistake lies in their equation of the 
fugitive and the eternal; and it is the final and fatal 
mistake according to Jesus, and a very common one — 
forgetfulness of God in fact (Luke xii. 20), a mistake 
that comes from not thinking things out. Jesus will have 
men think everything out to the very end. "He never 
says: Come unto me, all ye who are too lazy to think 
for yourselves" (H. S. Coffin). It is energy of mind 
that he calls for — either with me or against me. He does 
not recognize neutrals in his war — "he that is not against 
us is for us" (Luke ix. 50) — "he that is not with me is 
against me" (Matt. xii. 30). 

Where does a man's Will point him? That is the 
question. "Out of the abundance, the overflow, of 
the heart, the mouth speaketh" (Matt. xii. 34). What 
is it that a man wills, purity or impurity (Matt. v. 28)? 
It is the inner energy that makes a man; what he says 
and does is an overflow from what is within — an overflow, 
it is true, with a reaction. It is what a man chooses, 
and what he wills, that Jesus always emphasizes; "God 
knoweth your hearts" (Luke xvi. 15). Very well then; 
does a man choose God? That is the vital issue. Does 
he choose God without reserve, and in a way that God, 
knowing his heart, will call a whole-hearted choice? 

St. Augustine, in a very interesting passage (Con- 
fessions, viii. 9, 21), remarks upon the fact that, when 
the mind commands the body, obedience is instantaneous, 
but that when it commands itself, it meets with re- 
sistance. "The mind commands that the mind shall 
will — it is one and the same mind, and it does not obey/ 3 
He finds the reason; the mind does not absolutely and 



JESUS AND MAN 133 

entirely (ex toto) will the thing, and so it does not abso- 
lutely and entirely command it. "There is nothing 
strange after all in this," he says, "partly to will, partly 
not to will; but it is a weakness of the mind that it does 
not arise in its entirety, uplifted by truth, because it is 
borne down by habit. Thus there are two Wills, because 
one of them is not complete/' 

The same thought is to be traced in the teaching 
of Jesus. It is implied in what he says about prayer. 
There is a want of faith, a half-heartedness about men's 
prayers; they pray as Augustine says he himself did: 
"Give me chastity and continence, but not now" (Con- 
fessions, viii. 7, 17). That is not what Jesus means by 
prayer — the utterance of the half- Will. Nor is it this 
sort of surrender to God that Jesus calls for — no, the 
question is, how thoroughly is a man going to put himself 
into God's hands? Does he mean to be God's up to 
the cross and beyond? Does he enlist absolutely on 
God's terms without a bargain with God, prepared to 
accept God's will, whatever it is, whether it squares with 
his liking or not? (cf. Luke xvii. 7-10). Are his own 
desires finally out of the reckoning? Does he, in fact, 
deny — negate — himself (Mark viii. 34)? Jesus calls for 
disciples, with questions so penetrating on his lips. 
What a demand to make of men ! What faith, too, in men 
it shows, that he can ask all this with no hint of dimin- 
ished seriousness! 

Jesus is the great believer in men, as we saw in the 
choice of his twelve. To that group of disciples he 
trusts the supremest task men ever had assigned to 
them. Not many wise, not many mighty Paul found 
at Corinth (1 Cor. i. 26); and it has always been so. 



134 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

Is* it not still the gist of the Gospel that Jesus believes 
in the writer and the reader of these lines — trusts them 
with the propagation of God's Kingdom, incredible 
commission? Jesus was always at leisure for individuals; 
this was the natural outcome of his faith in men. What 
else is the meaning of his readiness to spend himself in 
giving the utmost spiritual truth — no easy task, as 
experience shows us — even to a solitary listener? If 
we accept what he tells us of God, we can believe that the 
individual is worth all that Jesus did and does for him, 
but hardly otherwise. His gift of discovering interest 
in uninteresting people, says Phillips Brooks, was an 
intellectual habit that he gave to his disciples. We 
think too much "like men"; he would have us "think 
like God,' 3 and think better of odd units and items of 
humanity than statesmen and statisticians are apt to 
do. It has been pointed out lately how fierce he is 
about the man who puts a stumbling-block in the way 
of even "a little one" — "better for him that a millstone 
were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the 
sea"; no mere phrase — for when he draws a picture, 
he sees it; he sees this scene, and "better so — for him 
too!" is his comment (Mark ix. 42). There was, we may 
remember, a view current in antiquity that when a man 
was drowned, his soul perished with his body, though I 
do not know if the Jews held this opinion. It is not 
likely that Jesus did. What is God's mind, God's con- 
duct, toward those people whom men think they can 
afford to despise? "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your 
Father in heaven is perfect" (Matt. v. 48). And to 
whom did he say this? To the most ordinary people 
— to Peter and James and John; for all sorts of people 



JESUS AND MAN 135 

he held up this impossible ideal of a perfection like 
God's. What a faith in man it implies! "All things 
are possible to him that believes" (Mark ix. 23). Why 
should not you believe? he says. 

His faith in the soul's possibilities is boundless, and 
in marked contrast with what men think of themselves. 
A man, for instance, will say that he has done his best; 
but nine times out of ten it means mere fatigue; he is 
not going to trouble to do any more. How can a man 
know that he has done his best? The Gospel of Jesus 
comes with its message of the grace of God, and the power 
of God, to people who are stupid and middle-aged, who 
are absolutely settled in life, who are conscious of their 
limitations, who know they are living in a rut and propose 
to stick to it for the remainder of their days; and Jesus 
tells them in effect that he means to give them a new 
life altogether, that he means to have from them service, 
perfectly incredible to them. No man, he suggests, 
need be so inured to the stupidity of middle age but 
there may be a miraculous change in him. A great 
many people need re-conversion at forty, however Chris- 
tian they have been before. 

This belief of his in the individual man and in the 
worth of the individual is the very charter of democracy. 
The original writings of William Tyndale, who first trans- 
lated the New Testament from Greek into English, 
contain the essential ideas of democracy already in 
1526 — the outcome of familiar study of the Gospel. 
Jesus himself said of Herod: "Go and tell that fox" 
(Luke xiii. 32) . Herod was a king, but he was not above 
criticism; and Christians have not failed at times to make 
the criticism of the great that truth requires. 



136 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

Jesus had no illusions about men; he sees the weak 
spots; he recognizes the "whited sepulchre" (Matt, xxiii. 
27). He is astonished at the unbelief of men and women 
(Mark vi. 6). He does not understand why they cannot 
think (Mark viii. 21), but he notes how they see and 
yet do not see, hear and do not understand (Matt. xiii. 13). 
He is impressed by their falsity, even in religion (Matt. 
xv. 8). He knows perfectly well the evil of which the 
human heart is capable (Matt. xv. 19). A man who 
steadily looks forward to being crucified by the people 
he is trying to help is hardly one of the absent-minded 
enthusiasts, mis-called idealists. There never was, we 
feel, one who so thoroughly looked through his friends, 
who loved them so much and yet without a shade of 
illusion. This brings us to the subject of the next chapter. 

In the meantime let us recall what he makes of the 
wasted life. "In thinking of the case," said Seeley, 
"they had forgotten the woman" — a common occur- 
rence with those who deal in "cases." It was once 
severely said of the Head of a College that "if he would 
leave off caring for his students' souls and care for them, 
he would do better." Jesus does not forget the man in 
caring for his soul — he likes him. He is "the friend of 
publicans and sinners" (Luke vii. 34); he eats and drinks 
with them (Mark ii. 14). Let us remember again that 
these were taunts and were meant to sting; they were not 
conventional phrases. See how he can enter into the 
life of a poor creature. There is the wretched little 
publican, Zacchseus (Luke xix. 1-10) — a squalid little 
figure of a man, whom people despised. He was used 
to contempt — it was the portion of the tax-collector 
enlisted in Roman service against his own people. Jesus 



JESUS AND MAN 137 

comes and sees him up in the tree; he instantly realizes 
what is happening and invites himself to the house of 
Zacchseus as a guest; something passes between them 
without spoken word. The little man slides down the 
tree — not a proceeding that makes for dignity; and then, 
with all his inches, he stands up before the whole town, 
that knew him so well, in a new moral grandeur that 
adds cubits to his stature. "Half my goods,' 5 he says, 
"I give to the poor. If I have taken anything from any 
man by false accusation, he shall have it back fourfold.' 1 
That man belonged to the despised classes. Jesus came 
into his life; the man became a new man, a pioneer of 
Christian generosity. Again, there is the woman with 
the alabaster box, the mere possession of which stamped 
her for what she was. It was simply a case of the wasted 
life. I have long wondered if she meant to give him 
only some of the ointment. A little of it would have 
been a great gift. But perhaps the lid of the box jammed, 
and she realized in a moment that it was to be all or 
nothing — she drew off her sandal and smashed the box 
to pieces. However she broke it, and whatever her 
reasons, Mark's words mean that it was thoroughly 
and finally shivered (Mark xiv. 3). Something had 
happened which made this woman the pioneer of the 
Christian habit of giving all for Jesus. The disciples 
said they had done so (Matt. xix. 27), but they were 
looking for thrones in exchange (Mark x. 37); she was 
not. The thief on the cross himself becomes a pioneer 
for mankind in the Christian way of prayer. "Jesus, 
remember me!" he says (Luke xxiii. 42). How is it that 
Jesus comes into the wasted life and makes it new? "One 
loving heart sets another on fire." 



138 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

With all his wide outlook on mankind, his great purpose 
to capture all men, Jesus is remarkable for his omission 
to devise machinery or organization for the accomplish- 
ment of his ends. The tares are left to grow with the 
wheat (Matt. xiii. SO) — as if Jesus trusted the wheat 
a good deal more than we do. Alive as he is to the evil 
in human nature, he never tries to scare men from it, 
and he seems to have been very little afraid of it. He 
believed in the power of good — because, after all, God 
is "Lord of the Harvest" (Matt. ix. 38). He invents no 
special methods — a loving heart will hit the method 
needed in the particular case; the Holy Spirit will teach 
this as well as other things (Matt. x. 19, 20). How far 
he even organized his church, or left it to organize itself 
if it so wished, students may discuss. Would he have 
trusted even the best organized church as such? Does not 
what we mean by the Incarnation imply putting every- 
thing in the long run on the individual, quickened into 
new life by a new relation with God and taught a new 
love of men by Jesus himself? The heart of friendship 
and the heart of the Incarnation are in essence the same 
thing — giving oneself in frankness and love to him who 
will accept, and by them winning him who refuses. Has 
not this been the secret of the spread of the Gospel? 
The simplicity of the whole thing, and the power of it, 
grow upon us as we study them. But after all, as Ter- 
tullian said, simplicity and power are the constant marks 
of God's work — simplicity in method, power in effect. 






CHAPTER VII 



JESUS* TEACHING UPON SIN 



"For clear-thinking ethical natures/ 5 writes a modern 
scholar, "for natures such as those of Jesus and St. Paul, 
it is a downright necessity to separate heaven and hell 
as distinctly as possible. It is only ethically worthless 
speculations that have always tried to minimize this 
distinction. Carlyle is an instance in our times of how 
men even to-day once more enthusiastically welcome 
the conception of hell as soon as the distinction between 
good and bad becomes all-important to them." 1 

Here in strong terms a challenge is put to many of 
our current ideas. Is not this to revert to an outworn 
view of the Christian religion — to reassert its dark side, 
better forgotten, all the horrible emphasis on sin and 
its consequences introduced into the sunny teaching 
of Jesus by Paul of Tarsus, and alien to it? Before we 
answer this question in any direct way, it is worth while 
to realize for how many of the real thinkers, and the 
great teachers of mankind, this distinction between 
good and evil has been fundamental. They have not 
invented it as a theory on which to base religion, but 
they have found it in human life, one and all of them. 
If Walt Whitman or Swami Vivekananda overlook the 
difference between virtue and vice, and do honor to the 

1 Wernle, Beginnings of Christianity (vol. i. p. 286, English 
translation). 

139 



140 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

courtesan, it simply means that they are bad thinkers, 
bad observers. The deeper minds see more clearly and 
escape the confusion into which the slight and quick, the 
sentimental, hurl themselves. Above all, when God in 
any degree grows real to a man, when a man seriously 
gives himself not to some mere vague "contemplation" 
of God but to the earnest study of God's ways in human 
affairs, and of God's laws and their working, the great 
contrasts in men's responses to God's rule become lu- 
minous. 

When God matters to a man, all life shows the result. 
Good and bad, right and wrong stand out clear as the 
contrast between light and darkness — they cannot be 
mistaken, and they matter — and matter for ever. They 
are no concern of a moment. Action makes character; 
and, until the action is undone again, the effect on char- 
acter is not undone. Right and wrong are of eternal 
significance now in virtue of the reality of God. 

Gautama Buddha, for instance, and the greater Hindu 
thinkers, in their doctrine of Karma, have taught a 
significance inherent in good and evil, which we can 
only not call boundless. Buddha did this without any 
great consciousness of God; and many Indian thinkers 
have so emphasized the doctrine that it has taken all 
the stress laid on Bhakti by Ramanuja and others to 
restore to life a perspective or a balance, however it 
should be described, that will save men from utter despair. 
Nor is it Eastern thinkers only who have taught men 
the reality of heaven and hell. The poetry of ^Eschylus 
is full of his great realization of the nexus between act 
and outcome. With all the humor and charm there 
is in Plato, we cannot escape his tremendous teaching 



JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 141 

on the age-long consequences of good and evil in a cosmos 
ordered by God. Carlyle, in our own days, realized 
the same thing — he learnt it no doubt from his mother; 
and learnt it again in London. In Mrs. Austen's drawing- 
room, with "Sidney Smith guffawing," and "other people 
prating, jargoning, to me through these thin cobwebs 
Death and Eternity sate glaring.' 2 "How will this 
look in the Universe,' 3 he asks, "and before the Creator 
of Man?" When someone in his old age challenged 
him with the question, "Who will be judge?" — (it is 
curious how every sapient inanity strikes, as on an original 
idea, on the notion that opinions differ, and therefore 
— apparently, if their thought has any consequence — 
are as good one as another) — Who will be judge? "Hell 
fire will be judge," said Carlyle, "God Almighty will 
be the judge now and always." There is a gulf between 
good and evil, and each is inexorably fertile of conse- 
quence. There is no escaping the issue of moral choice. 
That is the conclusion of men who have handled human 
experience in a serious spirit. As physical laws are 
deducible from the reactions of matter and force, and are 
found to be uniform and inevitable, fundamental in the 
nature of matter and force, so clear-thinking men in 
the course of ages have deduced moral laws from their 
observation of human nature, laws as uniform, inevitable 
and fundamental. In neither case has it been that 
men invented or imagined the laws; in both cases it 
has been genuine discovery of what was already existent 
and operative, and often the discovery has involved 
surprise. 

If Jesus had failed to see laws so fundamental, which 
other teachers of mankind have recognized, it is hardly 



142 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

likely that his teaching would have survived or influenced 
men as it has done. Mankind can dispense with a 
teacher who misses patent facts, whatever his charm. 
But there never was any doubt that Jesus was alive to 
the difference between right and wrong. His critics saw 
this, but they held that he confused moral issues, and that 
his distinctions in the ethical sphere were badly drawn. 

Jesus could not have ignored the problem of sin and 
forgiveness, even if he had wished to ignore it. To 
this the thought of mankind had been gravitating, and 
in Jewish and in Greek thought conduct was more and 
more the center of everything. For the Stoics morals 
were the dominant part of philosophy; but for our present 
purpose we need not go outside the literature of the New 
Testament. Sin was the keynote of the preaching of 
John the Baptist. It is customary to connect the mission 
of Jesus with that of John, and to find in the Baptist's 
preaching either the announcement of his Successor (as 
is said with most emphasis in the Fourth Gospel), or (as 
some now say) the impulse which drove Jesus of Nazareth 
into his public ministry. Whatever may be the his- 
torical connection between them, it is as important 
for us at least to realize the broad gulf that separates 
them. They meet, it is true; both use the phrase "King- 
dom of God," both preach repentance in view of the 
coming of the Kingdom; and we are apt to assume they 
mean the same thing; but Jesus took some pains to 
make it clear, though in the gentlest and most sympa- 
thetic way, that they did not. 

On the famous occasion, when John the Baptist sent 
two of his disciples to Jesus with his striking message: 
"Art thou he that should come? or look we for another?" 






JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 143 

(Luke vii. 19-35; Matt. xi. 1-19), Jesus, when the mes- 
sengers were gone, spoke to the people about the Baptist. 
"What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A 
reed shaken with the wind? A man clothed in soft 
raiment? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and much 
more than a prophet. Among those that are born of 
women there is not a greater prophet than John the 
Baptist, but he that is least in the Kingdom of God 
is greater than he." I am not sure which is the right 
translation, whether it is "he that is less, least, or little," 
and I do not propose to discuss it. The judgment is 
remarkable enough in any case, and the words of Jesus, 
as we have seen, have a close relation to real fact as he 
saw it. Why does he speak in this way? Our answer 
to this question, if we can answer it, will help us forward 
to the larger problem before us. But, for this, we shall 
have to study John with some care. 

There is a growing agreement among scholars that 
there is some confusion in our data as to John the Bap- 
tist. There are gaps in the record — for instance, how 
and why did the school of John survive as it did (Acts 
xviii. 25, xix. 1-7) ? And again there are, in the judgment 
of some, developments of the story. The Gospel, with 
varying degrees of explicitness, and St. Paul by inference 
(Acts xix. 4) tell us that John pointed to "him which 
should come after him. ,! Christians, at any rate, after 
the Resurrection, had no doubt that this was Jesus. 
Whether John was as definite as the narratives now 
represent him to have been, has been doubted in view 
of his message to Jesus. But that is not our present 
subject. We are concerned less with John as precursor 
than as teacher and thinker. 



144 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

Even if our data are defective, still enough is given us 
to let us see a very striking and commanding figure. We 
have a picture of him, his dress, his diet, his style of 
speech, his method of action — in every way he is a signal 
and arresting man. The son of a priest, he is an ascetic, 
who lives in the wilderness, dresses like a peasant, and 
eats the meanest and most meager of food — a man of the 
desert and of solitude. And the whole life reacts on him* 
and we can see him, lean and worn, though still a young 
man, a keen, rather excitable spirit — in every feature the 
marks of revolt against a civilization which he views as an 
apostasy. Luke, using a phrase from the Old Testament, 
says, "The word of God came upon John in the wilderness" 
(Luke iii. 2). Luke leans to Old Testament phrase, and 
here is one that hits off the man to the very life. Jesus 
himself confirms Luke's judgment (Mark xi. 29-33). The 
Word of the Lord has come on this ascetic figure, and he 
goes to the people with the message; he draws their at- 
tention and they crowd out to see him. He makes a 
great sensation. He is not like other men — for Jesus 
quotes their remark that "he had a devil" (Luke vii. 33) 
— a rough and ready way of explaining unlikeness to the 
average man. When he sees his congregation his words 
are not conciliatory; he addresses them as a "generation 
of vipers" (Luke iii. 7); and his text is the "wrath to 
come." 

Jesus asks whether they went out to see a reed shaken 
by the wind, or someone dressed like a courtier — the last 
things to which anyone would compare John. There was 
nothing supple about him, as Herod found, and Herodias 
(Mark vi. 17-20); he was not shaken by the wind; there 
was no trimming of his sails. The austerity of his life 



JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 145 

and the austerity of his spirit go together, and he preached 
in a tone and a language that scorched. He preached 
righteousness, social righteousness, and he did it in a 
great way. He brought back the minds of his people, 
like Amos and others, to God's conceptions and away 
from their own. Crowds of people went out to hear him 
(Mark i. 5), 1 and he made a deep impression on many 
whose lives needed amendment (Matt. xxi. 26, 32; Luke 
xx. 6). We have the substance of what he said in the 
third chapter of St. Luke; how he told the tax-collectors 
to be honest and not make things worse than they need 
be; the soldiers to do violence to no man and accuse no 
man falsely, and to be content with their wages; and to 
ordinary people he preached humanity: "He that hath 
two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and 
he that hath meat, let him do likewise.' 5 It may be 
remarked of John, and it is true also of Jesus, that 
neither attacked the absent nor inveighed against eco- 
nomic conditions, as some modern preachers do with, let 
us say, capitalists and the morality of other nations. 
Neither says a word against the Roman Empire. Slav- 
ery is not condemned explicitly even by Jesus, though 
he gave the dynamic that abolished it. The practical 
guidance that John gave, he gave in response to men's 
inquiries. 

Like an Old Testament prophet (cf. Amos iii. 2), John 
tore to tatters any plea that could be offered that his 
listeners were God's chosen people, the children of Abra- 
ham. Does God want children of Abraham? — John 
pointed to the stones on the ground, and said, if God 

1 So too says Josephus, who gives this as the reason of Herod's 
suspicion of him. 



146 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

wanted, he could make children of Abraham out of them; 
a word and he could have as many children of Abraham 
as he wished. It was something else that God sought. 

"John," writes the historian Josephus a generation later, 
"was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise 
virtue both in justice toward one another and piety 
towards God, and so to come to baptism; for so baptism 
would be acceptable to God if they made use of it, not to 
excuse certain sins, but for the purification of the body, 
provided that the soul was thoroughly purified before- 
hand by righteousness." 1 This interpretation of John's 
baptism makes it look very like the baptisms and other 
purificatory rites of the heathen. The Gospels attribute 
to John a message, richer and more powerful, but essen- 
tially the same; and the criticism of Jesus confirms the 
account. The great note in his preaching is judgment; 
the Kingdom of God is coming, and it begins with judg- 
ment. Again, it is like Amos — "The axe is at the root 
of the tree," "His fan is in His hand." And as men lis- 
tened to the man and looked at him — his intense belief in 
his message, backed up by a stern self-discipline, a whole 
life inspired, infused by conviction — they believed this 
message of the axe, the fan, and the fire. They asked and 
as we have seen received his guidance on the conduct of 
life; they accepted his baptism, and set about the amend- 
ing of character (Matt. xxi. 32). 

Jesus makes it quite clear that he held John to be an 
entirely exceptional man, and that he had no doubt that 

1 Antiquities of the Jews, xviii. 5, 2, § 117, cf. what Celsus says of 
righteousness as a condition of admission to certain mysteries that 
offer forgiveness of sins (Origen, c. Celsum, iii. 59). The "purifica- 
tion of the body" has a ritual and ceremonial significance. 



JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 147 

John's teaching was from God (Matt. xxi. 32; Luke vii. 
35, xx. 4; and, of course, Luke vii. 26-28). It was all in 
the line of the great prophets; and the Fourth Gospel 
shows it us once more in the work of the Holy Spirit — 
"when he is come, he will reprove (convict) the world of 
sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment" (John xvi. 
8). And yet, as Jesus says, there is all the difference in 
the world between his own Gospel and the teaching of the 
Baptist. 

In Mark's narrative (ii. 18) a very significant episode 
is recorded. John inculcated fasting, and his disciples 
fasted a great deal (pykna, Luke v. 33); and once, Mark 
tells us, when they were actually fasting, they asked Jesus 
why his disciples did not do the same? Jesus' answer is 
a little cryptic at first sight. "Can the children of the 
bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them?' 5 
Who fasts at the wedding feast, in the hour of gladness? 
And then he passes on to speak about the new patch 
on the old garment, the new wine in the old wine skins; 
and it looks as if it were not merely a criticism of John's 
disciples but of John himself. John, indeed, brings home 
with terrific force and conviction that truth of God which 
the prophets had preached before; but he leaves it there. 
He emphasizes once more the old laws of God, the judg- 
ments of God, but he brings no transforming power into 
men's lives. The old characters, the old motives more 
or, less, are to be patched by a new fear. 

"Repent, repent," John cries, "the judgment is com- 
ing." And men do repent, and John baptizes them as a 
symbol that God has forgiven them. But how are they 
to go on? What is the power that is to carry John's dis- 
ciples through the rest of their lives? We are not in pos- 



148 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

session of everything that John says, but there is no 
indication that John had very much to say about any 
force or power that should keep men on the plane of re- 
pentance. It is our experience that we repent and fall 
again; what else was the experience of the people whom 
John baptized? What was to keep them on the new 
level — not only in the isolation of the desert, but in the 
ordinary routine of town and village? In John's teaching 
there is not a word about that; and this is a weakness of 
double import. For, as Jesus puts it, the new patch on 
the old garment makes the rent worse; it does not leave 
it merely as it was. If the "unclean spirit" regain its 
footing in a man, it does not come alone — "the last state 
of that man is worse than the first" (Luke xi. 24-26). 
Jesus is very familiar with the type that welcomes new 
ideas and new impulses in religion and yet does nothing, 
grows tired or afraid, and relapses (Mark iv. 17). 

Again, in John's teaching, as far as we have it, there 
is a striking absence of any clear word about any rela- 
tion to God, beyond that of debtor and creditor, judge 
and prisoner on trial, king and subject. God may forgive 
and God will judge; but so far as our knowledge of John's 
teaching goes, these are the only two points at which 
man and God will touch each other; and these are not 
intimate relations. There is no promise and no gladness 
in them; no "good news." John taught prayer — all sorts 
of people teach prayer; but what sort of prayer? It has 
been remarked of the Greek poet, Apollonius Rhodius, 
that his heroes used prayers, but their prayers were like 
official documents. Of what character were the prayers 
that John taught his disciples? None of them survive; 
but there is perhaps a tacit criticism of them in the re- 









JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 149 

quest made to the New Teacher: "Teach us to pray, as 
John taught his disciples" (Luke xi. 1). One feels that 
the men wanted something different from John's prayers. 
Great and strenuous prayers they may have been, but in 
marked contrast to the prayers of Jesus and his followers, 
because of the absence in John's message of any strong 
note of the love and tenderness of God. 

Finally, the very righteousness that John preaches with 
such fire and energy is open to criticism. Far more serious 
than the righteousness of the Pharisees, stronger in in- 
sight and more generous in its scope, it fails in the same 
way; it is self -directed. It aims at a man's own salvation, 
and it is to be achieved by a man's own strength in self- 
discipline, with what little help John's system of prayer 
and fasting may win for a man from God. John fails 
precisely where his strength is greatest and most con- 
spicuous. His theme is sin; his emphasis all falls on sin; 
but his psychology of sin is insufficient, it is not deep 
enough. The simple, strenuous ascetic did not realize the 
seriousness of sin after all — it's deep roots, its haunting 
power, its insidious charm. St. Paul saw far deeper into 
it — "I am carnal, sold under sin. What I hate that do I. 
The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I 
would not, that I do. I see a law in my members bringing 
me into captivity to the law of sin. O wretched man that 
I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" 
(Rom. vii. 14-24).' Sin, in John's thought, is contumacy 
or rebellion against the law of God; he does not look at it 
in relation to the love of God — a view of it which gives it 
another character altogether. Nor has John any great 
conception of forgiveness — a man, he thinks, may win it 
by "fruits worthy of repentance" (Luke iii. 8). Here 



150 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

again Paul is the pioneer in the universal Christian expe- 
rience that fruits of repentance can never buy God's for- 
giveness. That is God's gift. That forgiveness may cost 
a man much — an amended life, the practices of prayer 
and fasting and almsgiving — John conceives; but we are 
not led to think that he thought of what it might cost 
God. John has no evangel, no really good news, with 
gladness and singing in it (I Peter i. 8) . 

When we return to the teaching of Jesus, we find that 
he draws a clear and sharp line between right and wrong. 
He indicates that right is right to the end of all creation, 
and wrong is wrong up to the very Judgment Throne of 
God (Matt. xxv.). He views these things, as the old 
phrase puts it, sub specie ceternitatis, from the outlook of 
eternity. Right and wrong do not meet at infinity. There 
is no higher synthesis that can make them one and the 
same thing. Everything with Jesus is Theocentric, and 
until God changes there will be no very great change in 
right and wrong. Partly because he uses the language of 
his day, partly because he thinks as a rule in pictures, his 
language is apt to be misconstrued by moderns. But the 
central ideas are clear enough. "How are you to escape 
the judgment of Gehenna?" he asks the Pharisees (Matt, 
xxiii. 33; the subjunctive mood is worth study). It is not 
a threat, but a question. There yawns the chasm; with 
your driving, how do you think you can avoid disaster? He 
warns men of a doom where the worm dies not and the 
fire is not quenched; a man will do well to sacrifice hand, 
foot or eye, to save the rest of himself from that (Mark 
ix. 43-48). But a more striking picture, though commonly 
less noticed, he draws or suggests in talk at the last sup- 
per. "Simon, Simon, behold Satan asked for you to sift 



JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 151 

you as wheat, but I prayed for thee, that thy faith fail 
not; and thou, when thou comest back, strengthen thy 
brethren" (Luke xxii. 31, 32). The scene suggested is not 
unlike that at the beginning of the Book of Job, or that 
in the Book of Zechariah (chap. iii.). There is the throne 
of God, and into that Presence pushes Satan with a de- 
mand — the verb in the Greek is a strong one, though not 
so strong as the Revised Version suggests. Satan "made 
a push to have you." "But I prayed for thee." To any 
reader who has any feeling or imagination, what do these 
short sentences mean? What can they mean, from the 
lips of a thinker so clear and so serious, and a friend so 
tender? What but unspeakable peril? The language has 
for us a certain strangeness; but it shows plainly enough 
that, to Jesus' mind, the disciples, and Peter in particular, 
stood in danger, a danger so urgent that it called for the 
Saviour's prayer. So much it meant to him, and he him- 
self tells Peter what he had realized, what he had done, 
in language that could not be mistaken or forgotten. To 
the nature of the danger that sin involves, we shall re- 
turn. Meanwhile we may consider what Jesus means by 
sin before we discuss its consequences. 

"The Son of Man," says Jesus, in a sentence that is 
famous but still insufficiently studied, "is come to seek 
and to save that which is lost" (Luke xix. 10). Our rule 
has been to endeavor to give to the terms of Jesus the 
connotation he meant them to carry. The scholar will 
linger over the "Son of Man" — a difficult phrase, with a 
literary and linguistic history that is very complicated. 
For the present purpose the significant words are at the 
other end of the sentence. What does Jesus mean by 
"lost"? It is a strong word, the value of which we have in 



152 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

some degree lost through familiarity. And whom would 
he describe as "lost"? We have once more to recall his 
criticism of Peter — that Peter "thought like a man and 
not like God" (Mark viii. 33) — and to be on our guard 
lest we think too quickly and too slightly. We may 
remark, too, that for Jesus sin is not, as for Paul and 
theologians in general, primarily an intellectual problem. 
He does not use the abstraction Sin as Paul does. But the 
clear, steady gaze turned on men and women misses little. 

There are four outstanding classes, whom he warns of 
the danger of hell in one form or other. 

To begin, there is the famous description of the Last 
Judgment (Matt. xxv. 31-46) — a description in itself not 
altogether new. Plenty of writers and thinkers had de- 
scribed the scene, and the broad outlines of the picture 
were naturally common property; yet it is to these more 
or less conventional traits that attention has often been 
too exclusively devoted. Jesus, however, altered the 
whole character of the Judgment Day scene by his ac- 
count of the principles on which the Judge decides the 
cases brought before him. On the right hand of the 
Judge are — not the Jews confronting the Gentiles on the 
left — nor exactly the well-conducted and well-balanced 
people who get there in Greek allegories — but a group 
of men and women who realize where they are with a 
gasp of surprise. How has it come about? The Judge 
tells them: "I was an hungered and ye gave me meat," 
and the rest of the familiar words. But this does not 
quite settle the question. Embarrassment rises on their 
faces — is it a mistake? One of them speaks for the rest: 
"Lord, when saw we thee an hungered and fed thee?" 
They do not remember it. There is something charac- 






JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 153 

teristic there of the whole school of Jesus; these people 
are "children of fact," honest as their Master, and they 
will not accept heaven in virtue of a possible mistake. 
And it appears from the Judge's answer that such in- 
stinctive deeds go further than men think, even if they 
are forgotten. Wordsworth speaks of the "little name- 
less unremembered acts of kindness and of love" that are 
"the best portion of a good man's life." 1 The acts of 
kindness were forgotten just because they were instinc- 
tive, but, Jesus emphasizes the point, they are decisive; 
they come, as another of his telling phrases suggests, 
from "the overflow of the heart," and they reveal it. 
With the people on the left hand it was the other way. 
They were fairly well in possession of their good records, 
but they had missed the decisive fact — they were in- 
stinctively hard. Such people Jesus warns. So familiar 
are his words that there is a danger of our limiting them 
to their first obvious meaning. Eighty years ago Thomas 
Carlyle looked out on the England he knew, and remarked 
that it was strange that the great battle of civilized man 
should be still the battle of the savage against famine, 
and with that he observed that the people were "needier 
than ever of inward sustenance.' 5 Is there a warning in 
this picture of the people on the left hand that applies to 
deeper things than physical hunger? A warning to those 
who do not heed another's need of "inward sustenance,' 5 
of spiritual life, of God? It looks likely. Otherwise there 
is a risk of our declining upon a "Social Righteousness" 
that falls a long way short of John the Baptist's, and does 
less for any soul, our own or another's* 



1 Lines Composed above Tintern, 34. 



154 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

The second class warned by Jesus consists of several 
groups dealt with in the Sermon on the Mount — people 
whose sin is not murder or adultery, but merely anger 
and the unclean thought — not the people who actually 
give themselves away, like the publicans and harlots — 
but those who would not be sorry to have that ring of 
Gyges which Plato described, who would like to do certain 
things if they could, who at all events are not unwilling 
to picture what they would wish to do, if it were available, 
and meanwhile enjoy the thought (Matt. v. 21, 22, 27-29). 
Here St. Paul can supply commentary with his suggestion 
that one form of God's condemnation is where he gives 
up a man to his own reprobate mind (Romans i. 28 — the 
whole passage is worth study in the Greek). The mind, in 
Paul's phrases, becomes darkened (Rom. i. 21), stained 
(Titus i. 15), and cauterized (1 Tim. iv. 2), invalidated for 
the discharge of its proper functions, as a burnt hand loses 
the sense of touch, or a stained glass gives the man a blue 
or red world instead of the real one. Blindness and mu- 
tilation are better, Jesus said, than the eye of lust (Matt, 
v. 28). How different from the moralists, for whom sin 
lies in action, and all actions are physical ! The idle word 
is to condemn a man, not because it is idle, but because, 
being unstudied, it speaks of his heart and reveals, un- 
consciously but plainly, what he is in reality (Matt. xii. 
36). Thus it is that what comes out of the mouth defiles 
a man (Matt. xv. 18) — with the curious suggestion, 
whether intended or not, that the formulation of a float- 
ing thought gives it new power to injure or to help. 1 
That is true; impression loose, as it were, in the mind, 



1 See end of Chapter II. 



JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 155 

mere thought-stuff, is one thing; formulated, brought to 
phrase and form, it takes on new life and force; and when 
it is evil, it does defile, and in a permanent way. Marcus 
Aurelius has a very similar warning (v. 16) — "Whatever 
the color of the thoughts often before thy mind, that color 
will thy mind take. For the mind is dyed (or stained) by 
its thoughts. 53 Phantazesthai and phantasiai are the words 
— and they suggest something between thoughts and im- 
aginations — mental pictures would be very near it. 

The third group whom Jesus warned, the most no- 
torious of all, was the Pharisee class. They played at 
religion — tithed mint and anise and cummin, and forgot 
judgment and mercy and faith (Matt, xxiii. 23). Jesus 
said that the Pharisee was never quite sure whether the 
creature he was looking at was a camel or a mosquito — 
he got them mixed (Matt, xxiii. 24). Once we realize 
what this tremendous irony means, we are better able 
to grasp his thought. The Pharisee was living in a world 
that was not the real one — it was a highly artificial one, 
picturesque and charming no doubt, but dangerous. For, 
after all, we do live in the real world — there is only one 
world, however many we may invent; and to live in any 
other is danger. Blindness, that is partial and uneven, 
lands a man in peril whenever he tries to come down- 
stairs or to cross the street — he steps on the doorstep that 
is not there and misses the real one. He is involved in 
false appearances at every turn. And so it is in the 
moral world — there is one real, however many unreals 
there are, and to trust to the unreal is to come to grief 
on the real. "The beginning of a man's doom,' 3 wrote 
Carlyle, "is that vision be withdrawn from him.' 3 'Thou 
blind Pharisee!" (Matt, xxiii. 26). The cup is clean 



156 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

enough without; it is septic and poisonous within — and 
from which side of it do you drink, outside or inside? 
(Matt, xxiii. 25). As we study the teaching of Jesus 
here, we see anew the profundity of the saying attributed 
to him in the Fourth Gospel, "The truth shall make you 
free" (John viii. 32). The man with astigmatism, or 
myopia, or whatever else it is, must get the glasses that 
will show him the real world, and he is safe, and free to 
go and come as he pleases. See the real in the moral 
sphere, and the first great peril is gone. Nothing need 
be said at this point of the Pharisee who us£d righteousness 
and long prayers as a screen for villainy. Probably his 
doom was that in the end he came to think his righteous- 
ness and his prayers real, and to reckon \them as credit 
with a God, who did not see through them any more than 
he did himself. It is a mistake to over-emphasize here 
the devouring of widow' houses by the Pharisee (Matt, 
xxiii. 14), for it was no peculiar weakness of his; publicans 
and unjust judges did the same. Only the publican and 
the unjust judge told themselves no lies about it. The 
Pharisee lied — lying to oneself or lying to another, which 
is the worse? The more dangerous probably is lying to 
oneself, though the two practices generally will go to- 
gether in the long run. The worst forms of lying, then, are 
lying to oneself and lying about God; and the Pharisee 
combined them, and told himself that, once God's proper 
dues of prayer and tithe were paid, his treatment of the 
widow and her house was correct. Hence, says Jesus, he 
receives "greater damnation" (A.V.) — or judgment on a 
higher scale (perissoteron krima). 

The Pharisees were men who believed in God — only 
that with his world, they re-created him (as we are all 



JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 157 

apt to do for want of vision or by choice); but what is 
atheism, what can it be, but indifference to God's facts 
and to God's nature? If religion is union with God, in 
the phrase we borrow so slightly from the mystics, how 
can a man be in union with God, when the god he sees is 
not there, is a figment of his own mind, something dif- 
ferent altogether from God? Or, if we use the phrase of 
the Old Testament prophet and of Jesus himself, if reli- 
gion is vision of God, what is our religion, if after all we 
are not seeing God at all, but something else — a dummy 
god, like that of the Pharisees, some trifling martinet who 
can be humbugged — or, to come to ourselves, a majestic 
bundle of abstract nouns loosely tied up in imperson- 
ality? For all such Jesus has a caution. Indifference to 
God's facts leads to one end only. We admit it ourselves. 
There are those who scold Bunyan for sending Ignorance 
to hell, but we omit to ask where else could Ignorance go, 
whether Bunyan sent him or not. Ignorance, as to germs 
or precipices or what not, leads to destruction in pari 
materia; in the moral sphere can it be otherwise? This 
serves in some measure to explain why Jesus is so tender 
to gross and flagrant sinners, a fact which some have 
noted with surprise. Surely it is because publican and 
harlot have fewer illusions; they were left little chance of 
imagining their lives to be right before God. What Jesus 
thought of their hardness and impurity we have seen 
already, but heedless as they were of God's requirements 
of them, they were not guilty of the intricate atheism of 
the Pharisees. Further, whether it was in his mind or 
not, it is also true that the frankly gross temptations do 
bring a man face to face with his own need of God, as the 
subtler do not; and so far they make for reality. 



158 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

The fourth group are those who cannot make up their 
minds. "No man, having put his hand to the plough, 
and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God" (Luke 
ix. 62). The word is an interesting one (euthetos), it 
means "handy" or "easy to place." 1 This man is not 
adapted for the Kingdom of God; he is not easy to place 
there. Like the man who saved his talent but did not 
use it (Matt. xxv. 24), he is not exactly bad; but he is 
"no good," as we say. Jesus conceives of the Kingdom of 
God as dynamic, not static; state or place, condition or 
relation, it implies work, as God himself implies work. 
He holds that truth is not a curiosity for the cabinet 
but a tool in the hand; that God's earnest world is no 
place for nondescript, and that there is only one region 
left to which they can drift. What part or place can 
there be in the Kingdom of Heaven — in a kingdom won 
on Calvary — for people who cannot be relied on, who 
cannot decide whether to plough or not to plough, nor, 
when they have made up their mind, stick to it? Jesus 
cannot see. What a revelation of the force and power of 
his own character! 

These, then, are the four classes whom Jesus warns, 
and it is clear from the consideration of them that his 
view of sin is very different from those current in that 
day. Men set sin down as an external thing that drifted 
on to one like a floating burr — or like paint, perhaps — 
it could be picked off or burnt off. It was the eating of 
pork or hare — something technical or accidental; or it 
was, many thought, the work of a demon from without, 

1 The word is used of the salt not " fit " for land or dunghill 
(Luke xiv. 35), and the negative of the inconvenient harbor (Acts 
xxvii. 12). 



JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 159 

who could be driven out to whence he came. Love and 
drunkenness illustrated the thing for them — a change of 
personality induced by an exterior force or object, as if 
the human spirit were a glass or a cup into which anything 
might be poured, and from which it could be emptied and 
the vessel itself remain unaffected. Jesus has a deeper 
view of sin, a stronger psychology, than these, nor does 
he, like some quick thinkers of to-day, put sin down to a 
man's environment, as if certain surroundings inevitably 
meant sin. Jesus is quite definite that sin is nothing 
accidental — it is involved in a man's own nature, in his 
choice, it comes from the heart, and it speaks of a heart 
that is wrong. 

When we survey the four groups, it comes to one 
central question at last: Has a man been in earnest 
with himself about God's dealings with him? Hard- 
ness and lust make a man play the fool with human 
souls whom God loves and cares for — a declaration of 
war on God himself. Wilful self-deception about God 
needs no comment; to shilly-shally and let decision slide, 
where God is concerned, is atheism too. In a word, 
what is a man's fundamental attitude to God and God's 
facts? That is Jesus' question. Sin is tracked home to 
the innermost and most essential part of the man — his 
will. It is no outward thing, it is inward. It is not that 
evil befalls us, but that we are evil. In the words of 
Edward Caird, "the passion that misleads us is a mani- 
festation of the same -ego, the same self-conscious reason 
which is misled by it," and thus, as Burns puts it, "it is 
the very 'light from heaven' that leads us astray.' 2 The 
man uses his highest God-given faculties, and uses them 
against God. 



160 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

But this is not all. Many people will agree with the 
estimate of Jesus, when they understand it, in regard to 
most of these classes; perhaps they would urge that in 
the main it is substantially the same teaching as John 
the Baptist's, though it implies, as we shall see, a more 
difficult problem in getting rid of sin. Jesus goes further. 
He holds up to men standards of conduct which transcend 
anything yet put before mankind. "Be ye therefore per- 
fect," he says, "even as your Father which is in heaven is 
perfect" (Matt. v. 48). When we recall what Jesus teaches 
of God, when we begin to try to give to "God" the con- 
tent he intended, we realize with amazement what he is 
saying. He is holding up to men for their ideal of con- 
duct the standard of God's holiness, of God's love and 
tenderness. Everything that Jesus tells us of God — all 
that he has to say of the wonderful and incredible love 
of God and of God's activity on behalf of his children — 
he now incorporates in the ideal of conduct to which men 
are called. John's conceptions of righteousness grow beg- 
garly. Here is a royal magnificence of active love, of 
energetic sympathy, tenderness, and self -giving, asked of 
us, who find it hard enough to keep the simplest com- 
mandments from our youth up (Mark x. 20). We are 
to love our enemies, to win them, to make peace, to be 
pure — and all on the scale of God. And that this may 
not seem mere talk in the air, there is the character and 
personality of Jesus, embodying all he asks of us — 
bringing out new wonders of God's goodness, the ugliness 
and evil of sin, and the positive and redemptive beauty of 
righteousness. 

The problem of sin and forgiveness becomes more 
difficult, as we think of the positive ideals which we 






JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 161 

have not begun to try to reach. Let us sum up what 
it involves. 

Jesus brings out the utter bankruptcy to which sin 
reduces men. They become "full of hypocrisy and law- 
lessness" (Matt, xxiii. 28), so depraved that they are like 
bad trees, unproductive of any but bad fruit (rotten, in 
the Greek, Matt. vii. 17); the very light in them is dark- 
ness, and how great darkness (Matt. vi. 23). They are 
cut off from the real world, as we saw, and lose the facul- 
ties they have abused — the talent is taken away (Matt. 
xxv. 28); "from him that hath not, shall be taken away 
even that which he hath" (Matt. xxv. 29). The nature 
is changed as memory is changed, and the "overflow of 
the heart" in speech and act bears witness to it. The 
faculty of choice is weakened; the interval in which 
inhibition — to use our modern term — is possible, grows 
shorter. The instincts are perverted and the whole 
being is disorganized. In a word, all that Jesus connotes 
by "the Kingdom of God" is "taken from them" (Matt. 
xxi. 43), and nothing left but "outer darkness" (Matt. 
xxii. 13). The vision of God is not for the impure (Matt. 
v. 8). Meanwhile sin is not a sterile thing, it is a leaven 
(Matt. xvi. 6). If our modern medical language may be 
applied— and Jesus used the analogy of medicine in this 
very case (Mark ii. 17) — sin is septic. In the first place, 
all sin is anti-social — an invasion ipso facto of the rights 
of others. The man who sins either takes away what 
is another's — a man's goods, a widow's house, or a woman's 
purity — or he fails to give to others what is their due, be it, 
in the obvious field, the aid the Good Samaritan rendered 
to the wounded and robbed man by the roadside (Luke 
x. 33), or, in the higher sphere, truth, sympathy, help in 






162 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

the maintenance of principle, or in the achievement of 
progress and development (cf. Matt. xxv. 43). Sin is the 
repudiation of the concepts of law, duty, and service, in a 
word, of the love on God's scale which God calls men to 
exercise. And its fruits are, above all, its dissemination. 
Injustice, a historian has said, always repays itself with 
frightful compound interest. If a man starts to debauch 
society, his example is quickly followed; and it comes to 

hatre,d. 

What, we asked, did Jesus mean by "lost"? This, 
above all, that sin cuts a man adrift from God. In the 
parable of the Prodigal Son this is brought out (Luke xv. 
11-32). There the youth took from his father all he 
could get, and then deliberately turned his back on him 
forever; he went into a far country, out of his reach, out- 
side his influence, and beyond the range of his ideas, and 
he devoted his father's gifts to precisely what would 
sadden and trouble his father most. And then came 
bankruptcy, final and hopeless. There was no father 
available in the far country; he had to live without him, 
and it came to a life that was not even human — a life of 
solitude, a life of beasts. Jesus draws it, as he does most 
things, in picture form, using parable. Paul puts the 
same in directer language — sin reduces men to a position 
where they are "alienated from the life of God" (Eph. 
iv. 18; Col. i. 21), "without God in the world" (Eph. ii. 
12), "enemies of God" (Rom. v. 10; Col. i. 21); but he 
does not say more than Jesus implies. Paul's final ex- 
pression, "God gave them up" (thrice in Rom. i. 24, 26, 
28), answers to the Judge's word, in Jesus' picture, "De- 
part from me" (Matt. xxv. 41). 



JESUS' TEACHING UPON SIN 163 

O Wedding-guest, this soul hath been 

Alone on a wide, wide sea: 
So lonely 'twas, that God himself 

Scarce seemed there to be. 

So Jesus handles the problem of sin, but that is only 
half the story, for there remains the problem of Redemp- 
tion. The treatment of sin is far profounder and truer 
than John the Baptist or any other teacher has achieved; 
and it implies that Jesus will handle Redemption in a 
way no less profound and effective. If he does not, then 
he had better not have preached a gospel. If in dealing 
with sin he touches reality at every point, we may expect 
him in the matter of Redemption to reach the very center 
of life. 1 How else can he, with his serious view of sin, 
say to a man, "Thy sins are forgiven thee"? (Mark ii. 5). 
But it is quite clear from pur records that, while Jesus 
laid bare in this relentless way the ugliness and hopeless- 
ness of sin, he did not despair: his tone is always one of 
hope and confidence. The strong man armed may find a 
stronger man come upon him and take from him the 
panoply in which he trusted (Luke xi. 21, 22). There is a 
great gulf that cannot be crossed (Luke xvi. 26) — yes, 
but if the experience of Christendom tells us anything, it 
tells us that Jesus crossed it himself, and did the impossible. 
"The great matter is that Jesus believed God was willing 
to take the human soul, and make it new and young and 
clean again." But the human soul did not believe it, till 
Jesus convinced it, and won it, by action of his own. 
"The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which 
wa,s lost"; and he did not come in vain. 

1 That he did so is emphasized again and again, in striking lan- 
guage, by St. Paul — e.g. Rom. v. 15-16, 20; 1 Tim. i. 14. 



CHAPTER VIII 



THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS 



By what they said, I perceived that he had been a great warrior, 
and had fought with and slain him that had the power of death 
(Heb. ii. 14), but not without great danger to himself, which made 
me love him the more. — Pilgrim's Progress, Part I. 

The subject before us is one of the greatest difficulty. 
Why Jesus chose the cross has exercised the thought of 
the Christian world ever since he did so. He told his 
disciples beforehand of what lay before him, of what he 
was choosing, but it was long before they realized that he 
meant any such thing. The cross was to them a strange 
idea, and for a long time they did not seriously face the 
matter. Once the cross was an accomplished fact, Chris- 
tians could not, and did not wish to, avoid thinking out 
what had meant so much to their Master; but it has 
mostly been with a sense of facing a mystery that in some 
measure eluded them, with a feeling that there is more 
beyond, something always to be attained hereafter. 

A very significant passage in St. Mark (x. 32) gives 
us a glimpse of a moment on Jesus' last journey to Jeru- 
salem. It is a sentence which one could hardly imagine 
being included in the Gospel, if it did not represent some 
actual memory, and a memory of significance. It runs 
something like this: "And they were in the way, going up 
to Jerusalem, and Jesus was moving on before them; and 
they began to wonder; and as they followed they began 

164 



THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS 165 

to be afraid." He is moving to Jerusalem with a purpose. 
They do not understand it. He is wrapped in thought; 
and, as happens when a man's mind is working strongly, 
his pace quickens, and they find themselves at a distance 
behind him. And then something comes over them — a 
sense that there is something in the situation which they 
do not understand, a strangeness in the mind. They 
realize, in fact, that they are not as near Jesus as they 
had supposed. And, as they follow, the wonder deepens 
into fear. 

Anyone who will really try to grapple with this prob- 
lem of the cross will find very soon the same thing. The 
first thing that we need to learn, if our criticism of Jesus 
is to be sound, is that we are not at all so near him as we 
have imagined. He eludes us, goes far out beyond what we 
grasp or conceive; and I think the education of the Chris- 
tian man or woman begins anew, when we realize how 
little we know about Jesus. The discovery of our ig- 
norance is the beginning of knowledge. Plato long ago 
said that wonder is the mother of philosophy, and he was 
right. John Donne, the English poet, went farther, and 
said: "All divinity is love or wonder." When a man then 
begins to wonder about Jesus Christ in earnest, Jesus 
comes to be for him a new figure. Historical criticism has 
done this for us; it has brought us to such a point that the 
story of these earliest disciples repeats itself more closely 
in the experience of their followers of these days than in 
any century since the first. We begin along with them on 
the friendly, critical, human plane, and with them we 
follow him into experiences and realizations that we 
never expected. It may be summed up in the familiar 
words of the English hymn, 



166 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

Oh happy band of pilgrims, 

If onward ye will tread 
With Jesus as your fellow, 

To Jesus as your head. 

These men begin with him, more or less on a footing of 
equality; or, at least, the inequality is very lightly marked. 
Afterwards it is emphasized; and they realize it with won- 
der and with fear, and at last with joy and gratitude. 

We may begin by trying steadily to bring our minds to 
some keener sense of what it was that he chose. To say, 
in the familiar words, that he chose the cross, may through 
the very familiarity of the language lead us away from 
what we have to discover. We have, as we agreed, to ask 
ourselves what was his experience. What, then, did his 
choice involve? It meant, of course, physical pain. There 
are natures to whom this is of little account, but the sen- 
sitive and sentient type, as we often observe, dreads pain. 
He, with open eyes, chose physical pain, heightened to 
torture, not escaping any of the suffering which anticipa- 
tion gives — that physical horror of death, that instinctive 
fear of annihilation, which nature suggests of itself. He 
took the course of action that would most severely test his 
disciples; one at least revolted, and we have to ask what 
it meant to Jesus to live with Judas, to watch his face, to 
recognize his influence in the little group — yes, and to 
try to win him again and to be repelled. "He learnt by 
the things that he suffered" that Judas would betray him; 
but the hour and place and method were not so evident, 
and when they were at last revealed — what did it mean 
to be kissed by Judas? Do we feel what he felt in the so- 
called trials — or was he dull and numbed by the catas- 
trophe? How did he bear the beating of triumphant 



THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS 167 

hatred upon a forsaken spirit? How did the horrible cry, 
"Crucify him! crucify him!" break on his ears — on his 
mind? When "the Lord turned and looked upon Peter" 
(Luke xxii. 61), what did it mean? How did he know 
that Peter was there, and what led him to turn at that 
moment? Was there in the Passion no element of un- 
easiness again about the eleven on whom he had con- 
centrated his hopes and his influence — the eleven of whom 
it is recorded, that "they all forsook him, and fled" (Mark 
xiv. 50)? No hint of dread that his work might indeed 
be undone? What pain must that have involved? What 
is the value of the Agony in the Garden, of the cry, "Eloi, 
Eloi, lama sabachthani" (Mark xv. 34)? When we have 
answered, each for himself, these questions, and others 
like them that will suggest themselves — answered them by 
the most earnest efforts of which our natures are capable — 
and remembered at the end how far our natures fall short 
of his, and told ourselves that our answers are insufficient 
— then let us recall, once more, that he chose all this. 

He chose the cross and all that it meant. Our next 
step should be to study anew his own references to what 
he intends by it, to what he expects to be its results and 
its outcome. First of all, then, he clearly means that 
the Kingdom of Heaven is something different from any- 
thing that man has yet seen. The Kingdom of Heaven 
is, I understand, a Hebrew way of saying the Kingdom of 
God — very much as men to-day speak of Providence, to 
avoid undue familiarity with the term God, so the Jews 
would say Heaven. There were many who used the 
phrase in one or other form; but it is always bad criticism 
to give to the words of genius the value or the connota- 
tion they would have in the lips of ordinary people. To a 



168 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

great mind words are charged with a fulness of meaning 
that little people do not reach. The attempt has been 
made to recapture more of his thoughts by learning the 
value given to some of the terms he uses as they appear 
in the literature of the day, and of course it has been 
helpful. But we have to remember always that the words 
as used by him come with a new volume of significance 
derived from his whole personality. Everything turns on 
the connotation which he gives to the term God— that is 
central and pivotal. What this new Kingdom of God is, 
or will be, he does not attempt fully to explain or analyze. 
In the parables, the treasure-finder and the pearl merchant 
achieve a great enrichment of life; so much they know at 
once; but what do they do with it? How do they look at 
it? What does it mean to them? He does not tell us. 
We only see that they are moving on a new plane, seeing 
life from a new angle, living in a fuller sense. What the 
new life means in its fulness, we know only when we gain 
the deeper knowledge of God. 

He suggests that this new knowledge comes to a man 
from God himself — flesh and blood do not reveal it (Matt. 
xvi. 17). "Unto you it is given," he says on another occa- 
sion, "to know the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven" 
(Mark iv. 11), and he adds that there are those who see 
and do not see; they are outside it; they have not the 
alphabet, we might say, that will open the book (cf. Rev. 
v. 3). He makes it clear at every point in the story of the 
Kingdom of God that there is more beyond; and he means 
it. It is to be a new beginning, an initiation, leading on 
to what we shall see but do not yet guess, though he gives 
us hints. We shall not easily fathom the depth of his 
idea of the new life, but along with it we have to study 



THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS 169 

the width and boldness of his purpose. This new lif e is 
not for a few — for "the elect," in our careless phrase. He 
looks to a universal scope for what he is doing. It will 
reach far outside the bounds of Judaism. "They shall 
come from the east and from the west, and from the north 
and from the south, and shall sit down in the Kingdom of 
God" (Luke xiii. 29). "Wheresoever this gospel shall be 
preached throughout the whole world," he says (Mark 
xiv. 9). "My words shall not pass away" (Luke xxi. 33). 
All time and all existence come under his survey and are 
included in his plan. The range is enormous. And this 
was a Galilean peasant! As we gradually realize what he 
has in mind, must we not feel that we have not grasped 
anything like the full grandeur of his thought? 

He makes it plain, in the second place, that it will be 
a matter for followers, for workers, for men who will 
watch and wait and dare — men with the same abandon- 
ment as himself. He calls for men to come after him, to 
come behind him (Mark i. 17, x. 21; Luke ix. 59). He 
emphasizes that they must think out the terms on which 
he enlists them. He does not disguise the drawbacks of 
his service. He calls his followers, and a very personal and 
individual call it is. He calls a man from the lake shore, 
from the nets, from the custom house. 

In the third place, he clearly announces an intention 
to achieve something in itself of import by his death. 
There are those who would have us believe that his 
mind was obsessed with the fixed idea of his own speedy 
return on the clouds, and that he hurried on to death to 
precipitate this and the new age it was to bring. Refer- 
ences to such a coming are indeed found in the Gospels 
as we have them, but we are bound to ask whence they 



170 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

come, and to inquire how far they represent exactly what 
he said; and then, if he is correctly reported, to make sure 
that we know exactly what he means. Those who hold 
this view fail to relate the texts they emphasize with 
others of a deeper significance, and they ignore the 
grandeur and penetration and depth of the man whom 
they make out such a dreamer. He never suggests him- 
self that his death is to force the hand of God. 

He himself is to be the doer and achiever of some- 
thing. We have been apt to think of him as a great 
teacher, a teacher of charm and insight, or as the great 
example of idealism, "who saw life steadily and saw it 
whole/' He lived, some hold, the rounded and well- 
poised life, the rhythmic life. No, that was Sophocles. 
He is greater. Here is one who penetrates far deeper into 
things. His treatment of the psychology of sin itself 
shows how much more than an example was needed. Here, 
as in the other chapters, but here above all we have to 
remember the clearness of his insight, his swiftness of 
penetration, his instinct for fact and reality. He means 
to do, to achieve, something. It is no martyr's death 
that he incurs. His death is a step to a purpose. "I have 
a baptism to be baptized with,' 3 he says (Luke xii. 50). 
"The Son of Man," he said, "is come to seek and to save 
that which was lost" (Luke xix. 10). 

In discussing in the previous chapter what he meant by 
the term "lost," our conclusion was that for Jesus sin was 
far more awful, far more serious, than we commonly 
realize. We saw also that so profound and true a psy- 
chology of sin must imply a view of redemption at least 
as profound, a promise of a force more than equal to the 
power of sin — that "violence of habit" of which St. Augus- 



THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS 171 

tine speaks. If the Son of Man is to save the lost, and if 
the lost are in danger so real, it follows that he must 
think of a thoroughly effective salvation, and that its. 
achievement will be no light or easy task. "To give one's 
life as a ransom for many," says a modern teacher, "is of 
no avail, if the ransom is insufficient." What, then, and 
how much, does he mean by "to save/' and how does he 
propose to do it? When the soul of man or woman has 
gone wrong in any of the ways discussed by Jesus — in 
hardness or anger, in impurity, in the refusal to treat 
God and his facts seriously — when the consequences that 
Jesus recognized have followed — what can be done to 
bring that soul back into effective relation with the God 
whom it has discarded and abandoned? That is the 
problem that Jesus had to face, and most of us have not 
thought enough about it. 

First of all, how far does Jesus understand salvation 
to take a man? The ancient creed of the Church includes 
the article of belief in "the forgiveness of sins.' 3 There 
are those who lightly assume that this means, chiefly or 
solely, the remission of punishment for evil acts. This 
raises problems enough of itself. The whole doctrine of 
Karma, vital to Buddhism and Hinduism, is, if I under- 
stand it aright, a strong and clear warning to us that the 
remission of punishment is no easy matter. Not only 
Eastern thinkers, but Western also, insist that there is 
no avoidance of the consequences of action. Luther 
himself, using a phrase half borrowed from a Latin poet, 
says that forgiveness is "a knot worthy of a God's aid" — 
nodus Deo vindice dignus. 1 But in any case escape from 

1 Horace, Ars Poetica, 191, Nee dens inter sit nisi dignus vindice 
nodus Incident, 



172 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

the consequences of sin, when once we look on sin with 
the eyes of Jesus, is of relatively small importance. There 
are two aspects of the matter far more significant. 

We have seen how Jesus regards sin as at once the 
cause and consequence of a degeneration of the moral 
nature, and as a repudiation of God. Two questions 
arise: Is it possible to recover lost moral quality and 
faculty? Is it possible for those incapacitated by sin to 
regain, or to enjoy, relation with God? 

When we think, with Jesus, of sin first and foremost in 
connection with God, and take the trouble to try to give 
his meaning to his words, forgiveness takes on a new 
meaning. We have to "think like God," he says (Mark 
viii. 33); and perhaps God is in his thoughts neither so 
legal nor so biological as we are; perhaps he does not 
think first of edicts or of biological and psychological 
laws. God, according to Jesus, thinks first of his child, 
though of course not oblivious of his own commands and 
laws. Forgiveness, Jesus teaches or suggests, is primarily 
a question between Father and son, and he tries to lead us 
to believe how ready the Father is to settle that question. 
Once it is settled, we find, in fact, Father and son setting 
to work to mend the past. The evil seed has been sown 
and the sad crop must be reaped, the man who sowed it 
has to reap it — that much we all see. But Jesus hints to 
us that God himself loves to come in and help his recon- 
ciled son with the reaping; many hands make light work, 
especially when they are such hands. And even when 
the crop is evil in the lives of others, the most horrible 
outcome of sin, God is still in the field. The prodigal, 
when he returns, is met with a welcome, and is gradually 
put in possession of what he has lost — the robe, the 



THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS 173 

shoes, the ring; and it all comes from his being at one 
with his Father again (Luke xv. 22 ff.). The Son of Man, 
historically, has again and again found the lost — the lost 
gifts, the lost faculties, the lost charms and graces — and 
given them back to the man whom he had also found and 
brought home to God. 

Let us once more try to get our thoughts Theocentric 
as Jesus' are, and our problems become simpler, or at 
least fewer. God's generosity in forgiveness, God's love, 
he emphasizes, again and again. Will a man take Jesus 
at his word, and commit himself to God? That is the 
question. Once he will venture on this step, what pictures 
Jesus draws us of what happens! The son is home again; 
the bankruptcy, the hideous solitude, the life among 
animals, bestial, dirty and empty, and haunted with 
memories — all those things are past, when once the 
Father's arms are round his neck, and his kiss on his 
cheek. He is no more "alienated from the life of God" 
(Eph. iv. 18; Col. i. 21), "without God in the world" 
(Eph. ii. 12), an "enemy of God" (Rom. v. 10); he was 
lost and is found, and the Father himself, Jesus says, 
cries: "Let us be merry" (Euphranthomen) . If we hesi- 
tate about it, Jesus calls us once more to "think like God,' 3 
and tells us other stories, with incredible joy in them — 
"joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner 
that repenteth," We must go back to his central concep- 
tion of God, if we are to realize what he means by salva- 
tion. St. Augustine (Conf., viii. 3) brings out the value 
of these parables, by reminding us how much more we 
care for a thing that has been ours, when we have lost it 
and found it again. The shepherd has a new link with 
his sheep lost and found again, a new story of it, a shared 



174 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

experience; it is more his than ever. And Jesus implies 
that when a man is saved, he is God's again, and more 
God's own than ever before; and God is glad at heart. 
As for the man, a new power comes into his heart, and a 
new joy; and with God's help, in a new spirit of sunshine, 
he sets about mending the past in a new spirit and with a 
new motive — for love's sake now. If the fruit of the past 
is to be seen, as it constantly is, in the lives of others, he 
throws himself with the more energy into God's work, 
and when the Good Shepherd goes seeking the lost, he 
goes with him. Christian history bears witness, in every 
year of it, to what salvation means, in Jesus' sense. Pun- 
ishment, consequences, crippled resources — no, he does 
not ask to escape them now; all as God pleases; these 
are not the things that matter. Life is all to be bound- 
less love and gratitude and trust; and by and by the new 
man wakes up to find sin taken away, its consequences 
undone, the lost faculties restored, and life a fuller and 
richer thing than ever it was before. 

Somehow so, if we read the Gospels aright, does Jesus 
conceive of Salvation. To achieve this for men is his pur- 
pose; and in order to do it, as we said before, his first 
step is to induce men to re-think God. Something must 
be done to touch the heart and to move the will of men, 
effectively; and he must do it. 

With this purpose in his mind — let us weigh our words 
here, and reflect again upon the clearness of his insight 
into life and character, into moral laws, the laws of 
human thought and feeling, upon his profound intelli- 
gence and grasp of what moves and is real, his knowledge 
(a strong word to use, but we may use it) of God — with 
this purpose in his mind, thought out and understood, 



THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS 175 

he deliberately and quietly goes to Jerusalem. He 
"steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem" (Luke ix. 
51). "I must walk/ 3 he said, "to-day and to-morrow 
and the day following; for it cannot be that a prophet 
perish out of Jerusalem" (Luke xiii. 33). To Jerusalem 
he goes. 

We may admit that with his view of the psychology 
of sin, he must have a serious view of redemption. But 
why should that involve the cross? That is our problem. 
But while we try to solve it, we must also remember that 
behind a great choice there are always more reasons than 
we can analyze. A man makes one of the great choices 
in life. What has influenced him? Ten to one, if you 
ask him, he does not know. Nothing else, he will say, 
seemed feasible; the thing was borne in on me, it came 
to me: reasons? He cannot tabulate reasons; the thing, 
he says, was so clear that I was a long way past reasons. 
And yet he was right; he had reasons enough. What 
parent ever analyzed reasons for loving his children, or 
would tabulate them for you? Jesus does not explain 
his reasons. We find, I think, that we are apt to have 
far more reasons for doing what we know is wrong, than 
we have for doing what we know is right. We do not 
want reasons for doing what is right; we know it is right, 
and there is an end of it. Once again, Jesus, with his 
clear eye for the real, sees what he must do. The salva- 
tion of the lost means the cross for himself. But why? 
we ask again. We must look a little closer if we are to 
understand him. We shall not easily understand him in 
all his thoughts, but part of our education comes from the 
endeavor to follow him here, to "be with him,' 5 in the 
phrase with which we began. 



176 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

First of all we may put his love of men. He never lost 
the individual in the mass, never lost sight of the human 
being who needed God. The teacher who put the law of 
kindness in the great phrase, "Go with him twain" (Matt, 
v. 41), was not likely to limit himself in meeting men's 
needs. He was bound to do more than we should expect, 
when he saw people whom he could help; and it is that 
spirit of abounding generosity that shows a man what to 
do (Luke vi. 38). Everywhere, every day, he met the 
call that quickened thought and shaped purpose. 

He walked down a street; and the scene of misery or 
of sin came upon him with pressure; he could not pass by, 
as we do, and fail to note what we do not wish to think of. 
He knows a pressure upon his spirit for the man, the 
child, the woman — for the one who sins, the one who 
suffers, the other who dies. They must be got in touch 
with God. He sits with his disciples at a meal — the men 
whom he loved — he watches them, he listens to them. 
Peter, James, John, one after the other, becomes a call to 
him. They need redemption; they need far more than 
they dream; they need God. That pressure is there night 
and day — it becomes intercession, and that grows into in- 
spiration. Our prayers suffer, some one has said, for our 
want of our identification with the world's sin and misery. 
He vvas identified with the 7~crlJ*<> sin mil ircry, and 
they followed him into his prayer. It becomes with him 
an imperative necessity to effect man's reconciliation with 
God. All his experience of man, his love of man, call 
him that way. 

The second great momentum comes from the love of 
God, and ius faith in God. Here, again, we must em r 
phasize for ourselves his criticism of Peter: "You think 



THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS 177 

like a man and not like God" (Mark viii. 33). We do 
not see God, as Jesus did. He must make plain to men, 
as it never was made plain before, the love of God. He 
must secure that it is for every man the greatest reality 
in the world, the one great flaming fact that burns itself 
living into every man's consciousness. He sees that for 
this God calls him to the cross, so much so that when he 
prays in the garden that the cup may pass, his thoughts 
range back to "Thy will" (Matt. xxvi. 42). It is God's 
Will. Even if he does not himself see all involved, still 
God knows the reason; God will manage; God wishes it. 
"Have faith in God," he used to say (Mark xi. 22). This 
faith which he has in God is one of the things that take 
him to the cross. 

In the third place, we must not forget his sense of his 
own peculiar relation to God. If it is safe to rely on St. 
Mark's chronological date here, he does not speak of 
this until Peter has called him the Messiah. He accepts 
the title (Mark viii. 29). He also uses the description, 
Son of Man, with its suggestions from the past. He 
forgives sins. He speaks throughout the Gospels as one 
apart, as one distinct from us, closely as he is identified 
with us — and all this from a son of fact, who is not insane, 
who is not a quack, whose eyes are wide open for the real; 
whose instinct for the ultimate truth is so keen; who lives 
face to face with God. What does it mean? This, for one 
thing, that most of us have not given attention enough 
to this matter. I have confined myself in these chapters 
to the Synoptic Gospels, with only two or three references 
to the Fourth Gospel, and on the evidence of the Synop- 
tic Gospels, taken by themselves, it is clear that he means 
a great deal more than we have cared to examine. He is 



178 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

the great interpreter of God, and it is borne in upon him 
that only by the cross can he interpret God, make God 
real to us, and bring us to the very heart of Gpd. That is 
his purpose. 

The cross is the outcome of his deepest mind, of his 
prayer life. It is more like him than anything else he 
ever did. It has in it more of him. Whoever he was, 
whoever he is, whatever our Christology, one fact stands 
out. It was his love of men and women and his faith in 
God that took him there. 

Was he justified? was he right? or was it a delusion? 

First of all, let us go back to a historic event. The 
resurrection is, to a historian, not very clear in its details. 
But is it the detail or the central fact that matters? Take 
away the resurrection, however it happened, whatever it 
was, and the history of the Church is unintelligible. We 
live in a rational world — a world, that is, where, however 
much remains as yet unexplained, everything has a prom- 
ise of being lucid, everything has reason in it. Great 
results have great causes. We have to find, somewhere or 
other, between the crucifixion and the first preaching of 
the disciples in Jerusalem, something that entirely changed 
the character of that group of men. 

Something happened, so tremendous and so vital, that 
it changed not only the character of the movement and 
the men — but with them the whole history of the world. 
The evidence for the resurrection is not so much what 
we read in the Gospels as what we find in the rest of the 
New Testament — the new life of the disciples. They are 
a new group. When it came to the cross, his cross, they 
ran away. A few weeks later we find them rejoicing to be 
beaten, imprisoned and put to death (Acts v. 41). What 



THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS 179 

had happened? What we have to explain is a new life — a 
new life of prayer and joy and power, a new indifference 
to physical death, in a new relation to God. That is one 
outcome of the cross and of what followed; and as his- 
torians we have to explain it. We have also to explain 
how the disciples came to conceive of another Galilean — 
a carpenter whom they might have seen sawing and 
sweating in his shop, with whom they tramped the roads 
of Palestine, whom they saw done to death in ignominy 
and derision — sitting at the right hand of God. Taken 
by itself, we might call such a belief mere folly; but too 
much goes with it for so easy an explanation. The cross 
was not the end. As Mr. Neville Talbot has recently 
pointed out in his book, "The Mind of the Disciples," if 
the story stopped with the cross, God remains unex- 
plained, and the story ends in unrelieved tragedy. But 
it does not end in tragedy; it ends — if we can use the 
word as yet — in joy and faith and victory; and these — 
how should we have seen them but for the cross? They 
are bound up with his choice of the cross and his triumph 
over it all. Death is not what it was — "the last line of all," 
as Horace says. Life and immortality have been brought 
to light (2 Tim. i. 10). "The Lamb of God taketh away the 
sin of the world." So we read at the beginning of the 
Fourth Gospel, and the historical critic may tell us that 
he does not think that John the Baptist said it. None 
the less, it is a wonderful summary of what Jesus has 
done, especially wonderful if we think of it being written 
fifty or sixty years after the crucifixion. For, as we survey 
the centuries, we find that the Lamb of God has taken 
away the sin of the world — to a degree that no one can 
imagine who has not studied the ancient world. Those 



180 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

who know the heathen world intimately will know best 
the difference he has made. All this new life, this new 
joy, this new victory over death and sin is attached to 
the living and victorious Son of God. The task of Paul 
and the others is, as Dr. Cairns says, "re-thinking every- 
thing in the terms of the resurrection." It is the new 
factor in the problem of God, so to speak — the new factor 
which alters everything that relates to God. That is 
saying a great deal, but when we look at Christian history, 
is it saying too much? 

But still our first question is unanswered; why should 
it have been the cross? One thinker of our day has sug- 
gested that, after all, suffering is a language intelligible 
to the very simplest, while its meaning is not exhausted 
by the deepest. The problem of pain is always with us. 
And he chose pain. He never said that pain is a good 
thing; he cured it. But he chose it. The ancient world 
stumbled on that very thing. God and a Godlike man, 
their philosophers said, are not susceptible to pain, to 
suffering. That was an axiom, very little challenged. 
Then if Jesus suffered, he was not God; if he was God, he 
did not suffer. The Church denied that, just as the 
Church to-day rejects another hasty antithesis about pain, 
that comes from New England. He chose pain, and he 
knew what he was choosing. Then let us be in no hurry 
about refusing it, but let us look into it. He chose it — 
that is the greatest fact known to us about pain. 

Again, the death of Christ reveals sin in its real sig- 
nificance, in its true perspective, outside the realm of 
accident and among the deepest things of God, sub specie 
ceternitatis. Men count themselves very decent people; so 
thought the priests and the Pharisees, and they were. 



THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS 181 

There is nothing about them that one cannot find in 
most religious communities and in all governing classes: 
the sense of the value of themselves, their preconceptions 
and their judgments — a strong feeling of the importance 
of the work they have to do, along with a certain re- 
luctance to face strange facts, and some indifference as to 
what happens to other people if the accepted theory of 
the Cause or the State require them to suffer. There is 
nothing about Pilate and Herod, and the Pharisees and 
the priests, that is very different from ourselves. But 
how it looks in front of the cross! We begin to see how it 
looks in the sight of God, and that alters everything; it 
upsets all our standards, and teaches us a new self- 
criticism. 

"You think like man, and not like God," said Jesus 
(Mark viii. 33). The cross reveals God most sym- 
pathetically. We see God in the light of the fullest and 
profoundest and tenderest revelation that the world has 
had. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 
that is the cry of Jesus on the cross. I have sometimes 
thought there never was an utterance that reveals more 
amazingly the distance between feeling and fact. That 
was how he felt — worn out, betrayed, spat upon, rejected. 
We feel that God was more there than ever. As has 
been said, if it is not God, it is nothing. "God," says 
Paul, "was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself 
(2 Cor. v. 19). He chose the cross; and in choosing it, 
Christians have always felt, he revealed God; and that 
is the center of the great act of Redemption. 

But there is a condition antecedent to understanding 
the cross. We have, as we agreed, to ask ourselves, what 
is the experience which led him to think as he did? In 



182 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

the simpler language of the Gospels, quite plain and easy 
to understand, the call to follow comes first — the call to 
deeper association with Jesus Christ in his love for men. 
Do not our consciences tell us that, if we really loved 
people as Jesus does, if we understood them as sympa- 
thetically and cared as much for them, the cross would 
be far more intelligible to us? But if, in plain fact, we do 
not see why we should bear the cross for others, why we 
should deny and obliterate self on this scale for the salva- 
tion of men — how, I ask, to people of such a mind should 
Jesus be intelligible? It is not to be expected. In no 
other sphere would one dream of it. When a man avows 
that he does not care for art or poetry, who would wish 
to show him poem or picture? How should a person, 
who does not care for men, understand the cross? Deeper 
association, then, with Jesus in his love of men, in his 
agony, in his trust in God — that is the key to all. As we 
agreed at the very beginning, we have to know him before 
we can understand him. 

It all depends in the long run on one thing; and that 
we find in the verse with which we started: "And as they 
followed, they began to be afraid." But they followed. 
We can understand their fear. It comes to a man in this 
way. If Jesus crucified means anything like what the 
Church has said, and has believed; if God is in that man 
of Nazareth reconciling the world to Himself; if there is 
real meaning in the Incarnation at all; if all this language 
represents fact; "then," he may say, "I am wholly at a 
loss about everything else." A man builds up a world of 
thought for himself — we all do — a scheme of things; and 
to a man with a thought-out view of the world, it may 
come with an enormous shock to realize this incredible 



THE CHOICE OF THE CROSS 183 

idea, this incredible truth, of God in Christ. Those who 
have dwelt most on it, and value it most, may be most 
apt to understand what I mean by calling it incredible, 
Think of it. It takes your breath away. If that is true, 
does not the whole plan of my life fall to pieces— my 
whole scheme of things for the world, my whole body of 
intellectual conceptions? And the man to whom this 
happens may well say he is afraid. He is afraid, because 
it is so strange; because, when you realize it, it takes you 
into a new world; you cannot grasp it. A man whose 
instinct is for truth may hesitate — will hesitate — about a 
conception like this. "Is it possible," he will ask himself, 
"that I am deluded?" And another thought rises up 
again and again, "Where will it take me?" We can un- 
derstand a man being afraid in that way. I do not think 
we have much right not to be afraid. If it is the incarna- 
tion of God, what right have we not to be afraid? Then, 
of course, a man will say that to follow Christ involves 
too much in the way of sacrifice. He is afraid on lower 
grounds, afraid of his family, afraid for his career; he 
hesitates. To that man the thing will be unintelligible. 
The experience of St. Augustine, revealed in his Confes- 
sions, is illuminative here. He had intellectual difficul- 
ties in his approach to the Christian position, but the rate 
of progress became materially quicker when he realized 
that the moral difficulties came first, that a practical 
step had to be taken. So with us — to decide the issue, 
how far are we prepared to go with Jesus? Have we 
realized the experience behind his thought? The rule 
which we laid down at the beginning holds. How far are 
we prepared to go in sharing that experience? That will 
measure our right to understand him. Once again, in the 



184 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

plainest language, are we prepared to follow, as the dis- 
ciples followed, afraid as they were? 

Where is he going? Where is he taking them? They 
wonder; they do not know; they are uneasy. But when 
all is said, the figure on the road ahead of them, waiting 
for them now and looking round, is the Jesus who loves 
them and whom they love. 

And one can imagine the feeling rising in the mind 
of one and another of them: "I don't know where he is 
going, or where he is taking us, but I must be with him." 
There we reach again what the whole story began with — 
he chose twelve that they might "be with him." To un- 
derstand him, we, too, must be with him. What takes 
men there? After all, it is, in the familiar phrase, the love 
of Jesus. If one loves the leader, it is easier to follow 
him. But, whether you understand him or whether you 
don't, if you love him you are glad that he chose the 
cross, and you are glad that you are one of his people. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 

Imperial Rome governed the whole of the Mediterranean 
world — a larger proportion and a greater variety of the 
human race than has ever been under one government. 
So far as numbers go, the Russian Empire to-day, the 
Chinese and the British, each far exceed it; for the popu- 
lation of the world is vastly larger than it was in Rome's 
days. But there was a peculiar unity about the Roman 
Empire, for it embraced, as men thought, all civilized 
mankind. It was known that, far away in the East, 
there were people called Indians, who had fought with 
Alexander the Great, but there was little real knowledge 
of them. Beyond India, there were vague rumors of a 
land where silk grew on the leaves of the trees. But 
civilized mankind was under the control of Rome. It 
was one rule of many races, many kingdoms, princedoms, 
cities, cantons, and tribes — a wise rule, a rule that al- 
lowed the maximum of local government and traditional 
usage. Rome not merely conquered but captured men all 
over the world; ruled them, as a poet said, like a mother, 
not a queen, and bound them to herself. Men were eager, 
not so much to shake off her yoke, as to be Romans; and 
from the Atlantic to the Euphrates men, not of Roman 
blood, were proud to bear Roman names and to be Roman 
citizens. "I was free born," said St. Paul, not without a 
touch of satisfaction (Acts xxii. 25-28). A general peace 
prevailed through the Roman world — a peace that was 

185 



186 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

new to mankind. There was freedom of intercourse; one 
of the boasts made by the writers of the Roman Empire 
is of this new freedom to travel, to go anywhere one 
pleased. Piracy on the sea, brigandage on the land, had 
been put down, and there was a very great deal of travel. 
The Roman became an inveterate tourist. He went to 
the famous scenes of Asia Minor, to Troy above all — to 
"sunny Rhodes and Mitylene" — to Egypt. Merchants 
went everywhere. And there was a fusing of cultures, 
traditions, and creeds, all over the Mediterranean world. 
Centuries before, Alexander the Great had struck out the 
splendid idea of the marriage of East and West. He 
secured it by breaking down the Persian Empire, and 
making one Empire from the Adriatic to this side of the 
Sutlej or Bias. He desired to cement this marriage of 
East and West in a way of his own. He took three hun- 
dred captive princesses and ladies, and married them in a 
batch to Macedonian officers — a very characteristic piece 
of symbolism. But his idea was greater and truer than 
the symbol. 

The Roman marriage of the East and West was a more 
real thing, for behind it lay three centuries of growing 
intercourse and knowledge along Alexander's lines. In 
the sphere of religion we find it most clearly. There rises 
a resultant world-religion — a religion that embraces all 
the cults, all the creeds, and at last all the philosophies, in 
one great system. That religion held the world. It is 
true, there were exceptions. There was a small and ob- 
jectionable race called Jews; there were possibly some 
Druids in Southern Britain; and here and there was a 
solitary atheist who represented no one but himself. 
These few exceptions were the freaks amongst mankind. 




CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN ROMAN EMPIRE 187 

Apart from them mankind was united in its general 
beliefs about the gods. The world had one religion. 

First of all, let us try to estimate the strength of this 
old Mediterranean Paganism. It was strong in its great 
traditions. Plutarch, who lived from about 50 a.d. to 
117 or so, is our great exponent of this old religion. To 
him I shall have to refer constantly. He was a writer of 
charm, a man with many gifts. Plutarch's Lives was the 
great staple of education in the Renaissance — and as good 
a one, perhaps, as we have yet discovered, even in this age 
when there are so many theories of education with foreign 
names. Plutarch, then, writing about Delphi, the shrine 
and oracle of the god Apollo, said that men had been "in 
anguish and fear lest Delphi should lose its glory of three 
thousand years" — and Delphi has not lost it. For ninety 
generations the god has been giving oracles to the Greek 
world, to private people, to kings, to cities, to nations — 
and on all sorts of subjects, on the foundation of colonies, 
the declaration of wars, personal guidance and the hope of 
heirs. You may test the god where you will, Plutarch 
claimed, you will not find an instance of a false oracle. 
Readers of Greek history will remember another great 
writer of as much charm, five hundred years before, Hero- 
dotus, who was not so sure about all the oracles. But 
let us think what it means, — to look back over three thou- 
sand years of one faith, unbroken. Egyptian religion had 
been unchallenged for longer still, even if we allow Plu- 
tarch's three thousand years. The oldest remains in 
Egypt antedate, we are told, 4000 B.C., and all through 
history, with the exception of the solitary reign of Amen- 
Hotep III., Egypt worshiped the same gods, with additions, 
as time went on. Again an unbroken tradition. And 



188 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

how long, under various names, had Cybele, Mother of 
Gods, been worshiped in Asia? By our era all these reli- 
gions were fused into one religion, of many cults and rites 
and ancient traditions; and the incredible weight of old 
tradition in that world is hard to overestimate. 

The old religion was strong in the splendor of its art 
and its architecture. The severe, beautiful lines of the 
Greek temple are familiar to us still; and, until I saw the 
Taj, I think I should have doubted whether there could be 
anything more beautiful. Architecture was consecrated to 
the gods, and so was art. You go to Delphi, said Plutarch, 
and see those wonderful works of the ancient artists and 
sculptors, as fresh still as if they had left the chisel yester- 
day, and they had stood there for hundreds of years, won- 
derful in their beauty. Think of some of the remains of the 
Greek art — of that Victory, for instance, which the Mes- 
senians set on the temple at Olympia in 421 B.C. She 
stood on a block of stone on the temple, but the block was 
painted blue, so that, as the spectator came up, he saw 
the temple and the angle of its roof, and then a gap of 
blue sky and the goddess just alighting on the summit of 
the temple. From what is left of her, broken and head- 
less, but still beautiful, we can picture her flying through 
the air — the wind has blown her dress back against her, 
and you see its folds freshly caught by the breeze. And 
all this the artist had disentangled from a rough block of 
stone — so vivid was his conception of the goddess, and so 
sure his hand. There are those who say that the conven- 
tional picture of God of the great artists is moulded after 
the Zeus of Pheidias. Egypt again had other portrayals of 
the gods — on a pattern of her own, strange and massive 
and huge, far older. About six hundred years before 






CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN ROMAN EMPIRE 189 

Christ the Egyptian King, Psammetichos (Psem Tek), 
hired Greek soldiers and marched them hundreds of 
miles up the Nile. The Greek soldiers, one idle day, 
carved their names on the legs of the colossal gods seated 
at Abu SymbeL Their names are found there to-day. 
So old are these gods. 

The religion was strong in the splendor of its ceremony. 
Every year the Athenian people went to Eleusis in splen- 
did procession to worship, to be initiated into the rites of 
the Earth-Mother and her virgin daughter, who had 
taught men the use of grain and the arts of farming — 
rites linked with an immemorial past, awful rites that 
gave men a new hope of eternal life. The Mother of the 
Gods, from Phrygia in Asia Minor, had her rites, too; 
and her cult spread all over the world. When the Roman 
poet, Lucretius, wants to describe the wonder and magic 
of the pageant of Nature in the spring-time he goes to 
the pomp of Cybele. The nearest thing to it which we 
can imagine is Botticelli's picture of the Triumph of 
Spring. Lucretius was a poet to whom the gods were 
idle and irrelevant; yet to that pageant he goes for a 
picture of the miraculous life of nature. More splendid 
still were the rites of the Egyptian Isis, celebrated all 
over the world. Her priests, shaven and linen-clad, carried 
symbols of an unguessed antiquity and magical power. 
They launched a boat with a flame upon it — on the river 
in Egypt, on the sea in Greece. All these cults made 
deep impressions on the worshipers, as our records tell us. 
The appeal of religious emotion was noticed by Aristotle, 
who remarked, however, that it was rather feeling than 
intellect that was touched — a shrewd criticism that de- 
serves to be remembered still. 



190 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

The gods were strong in their actual manifestations of 
themselves. Apollo for ninety generations had spoken in 
Delphi. At Epidauros there was a shrine of Asclepios. 
Its monuments have been collected and edited by Dr. 
Caton of Liverpool. There sick men and women came, 
lived a quiet life of diet and religious ceremony, preparing 
for the night on which they should sleep in the temple. 
On that night the god came to them, they said, in that 
mood or state where they lay "between asleep and awake, 
sometimes as in a dream and then as in a waking vision — 
one's hair stood on end, but one shed tears of joy and 
felt light-hearted." Others said they definitely saw him. 
He came and told them what to do; on waking they did 
it and were healed; or he touched them then and there, 
and cured them as they lay. Some of the cures recorded 
on the monuments are perhaps strange to our ideas of 
medicine. One records how the god came to man dread- 
fully afflicted with dropsy, cut off his head, turned him 
upside down and let the fluid run out, and then replaced 
his head with a neat join. Some modern readers may 
doubt this story; but that the god did heal people, men 
firmly believed. We, too, may believe that people were 
healed, perhaps by living a healthy life in a quiet place, a 
life of regimen and diet; and perhaps faith-healing or 
suggestion played as strong a part as anything else. Even 
the Christians believed that these gods had a certain 
power; they were evil spirits. 

Not only the gods of the temples would manifest them- 
selves of their grace. Every man had a guardian spirit, a 
genius; and by proper means he could be "compelled" to 
show himself visibly. The pupils of Plotinus conjured up 
his genius, and it came — not a daemon, but a god. The 



CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN ROMAN EMPIRE 191 

right formula (mantram) and the right stone in the hand — 
and a man had a wonderful power over the gods them- 
selves. This was called theurgy. 

But the great strength of this old religion was its infinite 
adaptability. It made peace with every god and goddess 
that it met. It adopted them all. As a French scholar 
has said, where there is polytheism there are no false 
gods. All the religions were fused and the gods were 
blended. The Roman went to Greece and identified 
Jupiter with Zeus; he went to Egypt and found him in 
Amun (Ammon) ; he went to Syria and found him in Baal. 
If the Jew had not been so foolish and awkward, there 
might have been a Jupiter Jehovah as well. It was a 
catholic faith, embracing everything — cult and creed and 
philosophy — strong in all the ways we have surveyed and 
in many more, above all because it was unchallenged. 

And yet, where is that religion to-day? That, to me, 
is one of the most significant questions in history — more 
so, the longer I stay in India. Men knew that that reli- 
gion of Greece and Rome was eternal; yet it is utterly 
gone. Why? How could it go? What conceivable power 
was there, I do not say, to bring it down, but to abolish 
it so thoroughly, that not a soul in Egypt worships Isis — 
how many even know her name? — not a soul in Italy 
thinks of Jove but as a fancy, and Pallas Athene in Athens 
itself is a mere memory? That is the problem, the his- 
torical problem, with which we have now to deal. 

First of all, let us look again, and more closely, at that 
old religion — we shall find in it at least four cardinal 
weaknesses. 

First, it stands for "the unexamined life," as Plato 
called it. "The unexamined life," he says, "is not livable 



192 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

for a human being.' 3 A man, who is a man, must cross- 
examine life, must make life face up to him and yield its 
secrets. He must know what it means, the significance of 
every relation of life — father and child, man and wife, 
citizen and city, subject and king, man and the world — 
above all, man and God. We must examine and know. 
But this old religion stood by tradition and not reflection. 
There was no deep sense of truth. Plutarch admired his 
father, and he describes, with warm approval, how his 
father once said to a man: "That is a dangerous question, 
not to be discussed at all — when you question the opinion 
we hold about the gods, and ask reason and demonstra- 
tion for everything." Such an attitude means mistrust, 
it means at bottom a fundamental unfaith. The house is 
beautiful; do not touch it; it is riddled by white ants, by 
dry rot, and it would fall. That is not faith; it is a strange 
confession; but all who hesitate at changes, I think, make 
that confession sooner or later. There is a line of Kabir 
which puts the essence of this: "Penance is not equal to 
truth, nor is there any sin like untruth.' ' This was one of 
the essential weaknesses of that old religion — its fear, and 
the absence of a deep sense of truth. 

In the next place, there is no real association of morals 
with religion. The old stories were full of the adventures 
of Jupiter, or Zeus, with the heroines, mortal women, 
whom he loved. Of some 1900 wall paintings at Pompeii, 
examined by a German scholar and antiquary, some 1400 
represent mythological subjects, largely the stories of the 
loves of Jupiter. The Latin dramatist Terence pictures 
the young man looking at one of these paintings and say- 
ing to himself, "If Jupiter did it, why should not I?" 
Centuries later we find Augustine quoting that sentence. 



CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN ROMAN EMPIRE 193 

It has been said that few things tended more strongly 
against morality than the stories of the gods preserved by 
Homer and Hesiod. Plato loved Homer; so much the 
more striking is his resolve that in his Republic there 
should be no Homer. Men said: "Ah, but you don't 
understand; those stories are allegories. They do not 
mean what they say; they mean something deeper." But 
Plato said we must speak of God always as he is; we must 
in no case tell lies about God "whether they are allegories 
or whether they are not allegories." Plato, like every real 
thinker, sees that this pretence of allegory is a sham. The 
story did its mischief whether it was allegory or not; it 
stood between man and God, and headed men on to 
wrong lines, turned men away from the moral standard. 

There was more. Every year, as we saw, men went to 
be initiated into the rites of Demeter at Eleusis, a few 
miles from Athens. And we read how one of the great 
Athenian orators, Lysias, went there and took with him 
to be initiated a harlot, with whom he was living, and 
the woman's proprietress — a squalid party; and they were 
initiated. Their morals made no difference; the priests 
and the goddesses offered no objection. In the temple of 
Aphrodite at Corinth there were women slaves dedicated 
to the goddess, who owned them, and who received the 
wages of their shame. With what voice could religion 
speak for morality in Corinth? At Comana in Syria — 
we read in Strabo the geographer, about the time of 
Christ — there was a temple where there were a thousand 
of these temple slaves. I say again, that is the unex- 
amined life. God and goddess have nothing to say about 
some of the most sacred relations in life. God, goddess, 
priest, worshiper, never gave a thought to these poor 






194 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

creatures, dedicated, not by themselves, to this awful life 
— human natures with the craving of the real woman for 
husband and child, for the love of home, but -never to 
know it. That was associated with religion; that was 
religion. There was always a minimum of protest from 
the Greek temples against wrong or for right. It is re- 
marked, again and again, that all the great lessons came, 
not from the temples, not from the priests, but from the 
poets and philosophers, from the thinkers in revolt against 
the religion of their people. Curiously enough, even in 
Homer himself, it is plain that the heroes, the men, are 
on a higher moral plane than the gods; and all through 
Greek history the gods are a drag on morality. What a 
weakness in religion! The sense of wrong and right is 
innate in man; it may be undeveloped, or it may be 
deadened, but it is instinctive; and a religion which does 
not know it, or which finds the difference between right 
and wrong to lie in matters of taboo or ceremonial defile- 
ment, cannot speak to one of the deepest needs of the 
human heart, the need of forgiveness. There is no right- 
eousness, in the long run, about these gods. 

In the third place, the religion has the common weak- 
ness of all polytheism. Men were afraid of the gods; 
there were thousands and thousands, hosts of them. At 
every turn you ran into one, a new one; you could never 
be certain that you would not offend some unknown god 
or goddess. Superstition was the curse of the day. You 
had to make peace with all these gods and goddesses — 
and not with them alone. For there was another class of 
supernatural beings, dangerous if unpropitiated, the 
daemons, the spirits that inhabited the air, that presided 
over life and its stages, that helped or hated the human 



CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN ROMAN EMPIRE 195 

soul, spiteful and evil half-divine beings, that sent illness, 
bad luck, madness, that stole the honors of the gods 
themselves and insisted on rituals and worship, often 
unclean, often cruel, but inevitable. A man must watch 
himself closely if he was to be safe from them all, if he 
was to keep wife and child and home safe. 

Superstition, men said, was the one curse of life that 
made no truce with sleep. A famous Christian writer of 
the second century, Tatian, speaks of the enormous relief 
that he found in getting away from the tyranny of ten 
thousand gods to be under a monarchy of One. A modern 
Japanese, Uchimura, said the same thing: "One God, not 
eight millions; that was joyful news to me." 

Fourth, this religion took from the grave none of its 
terrors. There might be a world beyond, and there 
might not. At any rate, "be initiated," said the priests; 
"you will have to pay us something, but it is worth it.' 5 
Prophets and quacks, said Plato, came to rich men's 
doors and made them believe that they could rid them 
of all alarm for the next world, by incantations and 
charms and other things, by a series of feasts and jollifica- 
tions. So they said, and men did what they were told; 
but it did not take away the fear of death. 

From the first century onwards men began systemati- 
cally to defend this old paganism. Plutarch wrote a series 
of books in its behalf. He brings in something like love of 
god for man. He speaks of "the friendly Apollo." But 
the weakness of Plutarch as an apologist is his weakness 
as biographer — he never really gets at the bottom of any- 
thing. In biography he gives us the characteristic rather 
than the character. Here he never faces the real issue. It 
is all defence, apology, ingenuity; but he defends far too 






196 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

much. He admits there are obscene rites; there had been 
human sacrifices; but the gods cannot have ordained them; 
daemons, who stole the names of gods, imposed these on 
men — not the gods; men practiced them to avert the 
anger of daemons. The gods are good. Waiving the fact 
that he had not much evidence for this in the mythology, 
how was a man to distinguish god from daemon, to know 
which is which? He does not tell us. Again he speaks of 
the image of Osiris with three lingams. He apologizes 
for it; he defends it; for the triplicity is a symbol of god- 
head, and it means that God is the origin of all life. Yes, 
but what that religion needed was a great reformer, who 
should have cut the religion clear adrift from idols of 
every kind, from the old mythology, from obscenity. It 
may very well be that such a reformer was unthinkable; 
even if he had appeared, he would have been foredoomed 
to fail, as the compromise of the Stoics shows. Plutarch 
and his kind did not attempt this. They loved the past 
and the old ways. At heart they were afraid of the gods 
and were afraid of tradition. Culture and charm will do a 
great deal, but they do not suffice for a religion — either to 
make one or to redeem it. 

The Stoics reached, I think, the highest morai level in 
that Roman world — great men, great teachers of morals, 
great characters; but as for the crowd, they said, let them 
go on in the religions of their own cities; what they had 
learnt from their fathers, let them do. So much for the 
ignorant; for us, of course, something else. That seems 
to be a fundamentally wrong defense of religion. It gets 
the proportions wrong. It means that we, who are peo- 
ple of culture, are a great deal nearer to God than the 
crowd. But if we realize God at all, we feel that we are 



CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN ROMAN EMPIRE 197 

none of us very far apart down here. The most brilliant 
men are amenable to the temptations of the savage and 
of the dock laborer. There was a further danger, little 
noticed at first, that life is apt to be overborne by the 
vulgar, the ignorant, if there is not a steady campaign to 
enlighten every man. The Roman house was full of 
slaves; they taught the children — taught them about gods 
and goddesses, from Syria, from Egypt, and kept thought 
and life and morals on a low plane. An ignorant public is 
an unspeakable danger everywhere, but especially in 
religion. 

The last great system of defence was the New Platon- 
ism. It had not very much to do with Plato, except that 
it read him and quoted him as a great authority. The 
Neo-Platonists did not face facts as Plato did. They lived 
on quotations, on authority and fancy, great thinkers as 
some of them were. They pictured the universe as one 
vast unity. Far beyond all things is God. Of God man 
can form no conception. Think, they would say, of all 
the exalted and wonderful and beautiful concepts you can 
imagine; then deny them. God is beyond. God is beyond 
being; you can conceive of being, and therefore to predi- 
cate being of God is to limit him. You cannot think of 
God; for, if you could think of God, God would be in 
relation with you; God is insusceptible of relation with 
man. He neither wills, nor thinks of man, nor can man 
think of him. A modern philosopher has summed up 
their God as the deification of the word "not.' 5 This God, 
then, who is not, willed — no! not "willed"; he could not 
will; but whether he willed or did not will, in some way 
or other there was an emanation; not God, but very 
much of God; very divine, but not all God; from this 



198 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

another and another in a descending series, down to the 
daemons, and down to men. All that is, is God; evil is 
not-being. One of the great features of the system was 
that it guaranteed all the old religions — for the crowd; 
while for the initiated, for the esoteric, it had something 
more — it had mystic trance, mystic vision, mystic com- 
prehension. Twice or three times, Plotinus, by a great 
leap away from all mortal things, saw God. In the mean- 
time, the philosophy justified all the old rites. 

Side by side with this great defense were what are known 
as the Christian heresies. They are not exactly Christian. 
Groups of people endeavored to combine Christianity with 
the old thought, with philosophy, theosophy, theurgy, and 
magic. They were eclectics; they compromised. The 
German thinker, Novalis, said very justly that all eclec- 
tics are sceptics, and the more eclectic the more sceptic. 
These mixtures could not prevail. 

But religions have, historically, a wonderful way of 
living in spite of their weaknesses — yes, and in spite of 
their apologetics. A religion may be stained with all 
sorts of evil, and may communicate it; and yet it will 
survive, until there is an alternative with more truth and 
more dynamic. The old paganism outlived Plato's criti- 
cisms and Plutarch's defenses. For the great masses of 
people neither might have written. 

Into this world came the Christian Church. I have 
tried to draw the picture of the great pagan religion, with 
its enormous strength, its universal acceptance, its great 
traditions, its splendors of art and ceremony, its manifest 
proofs of its gods — everything that, to the ordinary mind, 
could make for reality and for power; to show how abso- 
lutely inconceivable it was that it could ever pass away. 



CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN ROMAN EMPIRE 199 

Then comes the Christian Church — a ludicrous collection 
of trivial people, very ignorant and very common; fisher- 
men and publicans, as the Gospels show us, "the baker 
and the fuller/ 3 as Celsus said with a sneer. Yes, and 
every kind of unclean and disreputable person they urged 
to join them, quite unlike all decent and established reli- 
gions. And they took the children and women of the 
family away into a corner, and whispered to them and 
misled them — "Only believe!" was their one great word. 
The whole thing was incredibly silly. Paul went to 
Athens, and they asked him there about his religion; 
and when he spoke to them about Jesus rising from the 
dead, they sniggered, and the more polite suggested 
"another day." Everybody knew that dead men do not 
rise. It was a silly religion. Celsus pictured the frogs in 
symposium round a swamp, croaking to one another how 
God forsakes the whole universe, the spheres of heaven, 
to dwell with us; we frogs are so like God; he never ceases 
to seek how we may dwell with him for ever; but some of 
us are sinners, so God will come — or send his son — and 
burn them up; and the rest of us will live with him for 
eternity. Is not that very like the Christian religion? 
Celsus asked. It has been replied that, if the frogs really 
could say this and did say this, then their statement 
might be quite reasonable. But our main purpose for 
the moment is to realize the utterly inconceivable ab- 
surdity of this bunch of Galilean fishermen — and fools 
and rascals and maniacs — setting out to capture the 
world. One of them wrote an Apocalypse, He was in a 
penal settlement on Patmos, when he wrote it. The 
sect was in a fair way of being stamped out in blood, as a 
matter of fact; but this dreamer saw a triumphant Church 



200 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

of ten thousand times ten thousand — and thousands of 
thousands — there were hardly as many people in the 
world at that time; the great Rome had fallen and the 
"Lamb" ruled. Imagine the amusement of a Roman 
pagan of 100 a.d. who read the absurd book. Yet the 
dream has come true; that Church has triumphed. Where 
is the old religion? Christ has conquered, and all the 
gods have gone, utterly gone — they are memories now, 
and nothing more. 

Why did they go? The Christian Church refused to 
compromise. 

A pagan could have seen no real reason why Jesus 
should not be a demi-god like Herakles or Dionysos; no 
reason, either, why a man should not worship Jesus as 
well as these. One of the Roman Emperors, a little after 
200 a.d., had in his private sanctuary four or five statues 
of gods, and one of them was Jesus. Why not? The 
Roman world had open arms for Jesus as well as any 
other god or demi-god, if people would be sensible; but 
the Christian said, No. He would not allow Jesus to be 
put into that pantheon, nor would he worship the gods 
himself, not even the genius of the Emperor, his guardian 
spirit. The Christian proclaimed a war of religion in 
which there shall be no compromise and no peace, till 
Christ is lord of all; the thing shall be fought out to the 
bitter end. And it has been. He was resolved that the 
old gods should go; and they have gone. How was it 
done? 

Here we touch what I think one of the greatest won- 
ders that history has to show. How did the Church do 
it? If I may invent or adapt three words, the Christian 
"out-lived" the pagan, "out-died" him, and "out-thought" 



CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN ROMAN EMPIRE 201 

him. He came into the world and lived a great deal 
better than the pagan; he beat him hollow in living. 
Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians do not indicate a high 
standard of life at Corinth. The Corinthians were a very 
poor sort of Christians. But another Epistle, written to 
the Corinthians a generation later, speaks of their passion 
for being kind to men, and of a broadened and deeper life, 
in spite of their weaknesses. Here and there one recog- 
nizes failure all along the line — yes, but the line advances. 
The old world had had morals, plenty of morals — the 
Stoics overflowed with morals. But the Christian came 
into the world, not with a system of morality — he had 
rules, indeed — "which,' 5 asks Tertullian, "is the ampler 
rule, Thou shalt not commit adultery, or the rule that 
forbids a single lustful look?" — but it was not rules so 
much that he brought into the world as a great passion. 
"The Son of God/' he said, "loved me and gave himself 
for me. That man — Jesus Christ loved him, gave himself 
for him. He is the friend of my best Friend. My best 
Friend loves that man, gave himself for him, died for 
him." How it alters all the relations of life! Who can 
kill or rob another man, when he remembers whose hands 
were nailed to the Cross for that man? See how it bears 
on another side of morality. Tertullian strikes out a 
great phrase, a new idea altogether, when he speaks of 
"the victim of the common lust." Christ died for her — 
how it safeguards her and uplifts her! Men came into 
the world full of this passion for Jesus Christ. They went 
to the slave and to the temple-woman and told them: 
"The Son of God loved you and gave himself for you"; 
and they believed it, and rose into a new life. To be 
redeemed by the Son of God gave the slave a new self- 



202 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

respect, a new manhood. He astonished people by his 
truth, his honesty, his cleanness; and there was a new 
brightness and gaiety about him. So there was about 
the woman. They sang, they overflowed with good 
temper. It seemed as if they had been born again. As 
Clement of Rome wrote, the Holy Spirit was a glad spirit. 
The word used both by him and by St. Augustine is that 
which gives us the English word "hilarious." There was 
a new gladness and happiness about these people. "It 
befits Truth to laugh, because she is glad — to play with 
her rivals because she is free from fear," so said Tertullian. 
Of course, there were those who broke down, but Julian 
the Apostate, in his letters to his heathen priests, is a 
reluctant witness to the higher character of Christian life. 
And it was Jesus who was the secret of it. 

The pagan noticed the new fortitude in the face of 
death. Tertullian himself was immensely impressed with 
it. He had never troubled to look at the Gospels. Nobody 
bothered to read them unless they were converted already, 
he said. But he seems to have seen these Christian mar- 
tyrs die. "Every man,' 5 he said, "who sees it, is moved 
with some misgiving, and is set on fire to learn the reason; 
he inquires and he is taught; and when he has learnt the 
truth, he instantly follows it himself as well." "No one 
would have wished to be killed, unless he was in possession 
of the truth.' 1 I think that is autobiography. The intel- 
lectual energy of the man is worth noting — his insistence 
on understanding, his instant resolution; such qualities, we 
saw, had won the admiration of Jesus. Here is a man who 
sacrifices a great career — his genius, his wit, his humor, 
fire, power, learning, philosophy, everything thrown at 
Christ's feet, and Christ uses them all. 



CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN ROMAN EMPIRE 203 

Then came a day when persecution was breaking out 
again. Some Christians were for "fleeing to the next 
city" — it was the one text in their Bible, he said. He 
said: "I stay here." Any day the mob might get excited 
and shout: "The Christians to the lions." They knew the 
street in which he lived, and they would drag him — the 
scholar, the man of letters and of imagination — naked 
through the streets; torn and bleeding, they would tie 
him to the stake in the middle of the amphitheater and 
pile faggots round him, and there he would stand waiting 
to be burnt alive; or, it might be, to be killed by the 
beasts. Any hour, any day. "I stay here/ 2 he said. 
What does it cost a man to do that? People asked what 
was the magic of it. The magic of it was just this — on 
the other side of the fire was the same Friend; "if he 
wants me to be burnt alive, I am here.' 5 Jesus Christ 
was the secret of it. 

The Christians out-thought the pagan world. How 
could they fail to? "We have peace with God,' 3 said 
Paul. They moved about in a new world, which was 
their Father's world. They would go to the shrines and 
ask uncomfortable questions. Lucian, who was a pagan 
and a scoffer, said that on one side of the shrines the 
notice was posted: "Christians outside." The Christians 
saw too much. The living god in that shrine was a big 
snake with a mask tied on — good enough for the pagan; 
but the Christian would see the strings. Even the daemons 
they dismissed to irrelevance and non-entity. The essence 
of magic was to be able to link the name of a daemon with 
the name of one's enemy, to set the daemon on the man. 
"Very well," said the Christian, "link my name with 
your daemons. Use my name in any magic you like. 



204 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

There is a name that is above every name; I am not 
afraid." That put the daemons into their right place, 
and by and by they vanished, dropped out, died of sheer 
inanition and neglect. Wherever Jesus Christ has been, 
the daemons have gone. "There used to be fairies," said 
an old woman in the Highlands of Scotland to a friend of 
mine, "but the Gospel came and drove them away.' 3 I 
do not know what is going to keep them away yet but 
Jesus Christ. The Christian read the ancient literature 
with the same freedom of mind, and was not in bondage 
to it; he had a new outlook; he could criticise more freely. 
One great principle is given by Clement of Alexandria: 
"The beautiful, wherever it is, is ours, because it came 
from our God.' 3 The Christian read the best books, 
assimilated them, and lived the freest intellectual life 
that the world had. Jesus had set him to be true to fact. 
Why had Christian churches to be so much larger than 
pagan temples? Why are they so still? Because the 
sermon is in the very center of all Christian worship — 
clear, definite Christian teaching about Jesus Christ. 
There is no place for an ignorant Christian. From the 
very start every Christian had to know and to under- 
stand, and he had to read the Gospels; he had to be able 
to give the reason for his faith. He was committed to a 
great propaganda, to the preaching of Jesus, and he had 
to preach with penetration and appeal. There they were 
loyal to the essential idea of Jesus — they were "sons of 
fact.' 3 They read about Jesus, and they knew him, and 
they knew where they stood. This has been the essence 
of the Christian religion. Put that alongside of the pitiful 
defense which Plutarch makes of obscene rites, filthy 
images, foolish traditions. Who did the thinking in that 



CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN ROMAN EMPIRE 205 

ancient world? Again and again it was the Christian. 

The old religion crumbled and fell, beaten in thought, 
in morals, in life, in death. And by and by the only name 
for it was paganism, the religion of the back-country vil- 
age, of the out-of-the-way places. Christ had conquered. 
Die tropoeum passionis, die triumphalem Crucem, sang 
Prudentius — "Sing the trophy of the Passion; sing the 
all-triumphant Cross. ,J The ancients thought that God 
repeated the whole history of the universe over and over 
again, like a cinema show. Some of them thought the 
kingdoms rise and fall by pure chance. No, said Pru- 
dentius, God planned; God developed the history of man- 
kind; he made Rome for his own purposes, for Christ. 

What is the explanation of it? We who live in a rational 
universe, where real results come from real causes, must 
ask what is the power that has carried the Christian 
Church to victory over that great old religion. And there 
is another question: is this story going to be repeated? 
What is there about Shiva, Kali, or Shri Krishna that 
essentially differentiates them from the gods of Greece 
and Rome and Egypt? Tradition, legend, philosophy — 
point by point, we find the same thing; and we find the 
same Christian Church, with the same ideals, facing the 
same conflict. What will be the result? The result will 
be the same. We have seen in China, in the last two 
decades, how the Christian Church is true to its tradi- 
tions; how men can die for Jesus Christ. In the Greek 
Church — a suffering Church — on the round sacramental 
wafer there is a cross, and the words * 'Jesus Christ con- 
quers." That is the story of the Christian Church in the 
Roman Empire. That is the story which, please God, 
we shall see again in India. "Jesus Christ conquers." 



CHAPTER X 

JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 

Jesus Christ came to men as a great new experience. 
He took them far outside all they had known of God 
and of man. He led them, historically, into what was, 
in truth, a new world, into a new understanding of life 
in all its relations. What they had never noticed before, 
he brought to their knowledge, he made interesting to 
them, and intelligible. In short, as Paul put it, "if any 
man be in Christ, it is a new creation" (II Cor. v. 17). The 
aspects of things were different; the values were changed, 
and a new perspective made clear relations that were 
obscure and tangled before. Why should it have been so? 
Why should it be, that, when a man comes into contact, 
into some kind of sympathy with Jesus Christ, some 
living union with him, everything becomes new, and he 
by and by begins to feel with St. Paul: "To me to live is 
Christ" (Phil. i. 21)? Why has Jesus meant so much? 
Why should all this be associated with him? 

Plato, in the sentence already quoted, tells us that "the 
unexamined life is unlivable for a human being, for a real 
man." Here, then, came into man's life a new experience 
altogether, like nothing known before — altering every- 
thing, giving new sympathies, new passions, new en- 
thusiasms — a new attitude to God and a new attitude 
to men. It was inevitable that thought must work upon 

it. Who was this Jesus that he should produce this 

206 



JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 207 

result? Men asked themselves that very early; and if 
they were slow to do so, the criticism of the outsider 
drove them into it. The result has been nineteen cen- 
turies of endless question and speculation as to Jesus 
Christ— the rise of dogma, creed, and formula, as slowly 
all the philosophy of mankind has been re-thought in the 
light of the central experience of Jesus Christ. In spite 
of all that we may regret in the war of creeds, it was 
inevitable — it was part of the disturbance that Jesus 
foresaw he must make (Luke xii. 51). Men "could do no 
other" — they had to determine for themselves the sig- 
nificance of Jesus in the real world, in the whole cosmos 
of God; and it meant fruitful conflict of opinion, the 
growth of the human mind, and an ever-heightened 
emphasis on Jesus. 

An analogy may illustrate in some way the story be- 
fore us. One of the most fascinating chapters of geog- 
raphy is the early exploration of America. Chesapeake 
Bay was missed by one explorer. Fog or darkness may 
have been the cause of his missing the place; but he 
missed it, and, though it is undoubtedly there, he made 
his map without it. Now let us suppose a similar case — 
for it must often have happened in early days — and this 
time we will say it was the Hudson, or some river of that 
magnitude. A later explorer came, and where the map 
showed a shore without a break, he found a huge inlet 
or outlet. Was it an arm of the sea, a vast bay, or was it 
a great river? A very great deal depended on which it 
was, and the first thing was to determine that. There 
were several ways of doing it. One was to sail up and 
map the course. A quicker way was to drop a bucket 
over the side of the ship. The bucket, we may be sure, 



208 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

went down; and it came up with fresh water; and the 
water was an instant revelation of several new and im- 
portant facts. They had discovered, first of all, that 
where there was an unbroken coast-line on the map, 
there was nothing of the kind in reality; there was a 
broad waterway up into the country; and this was not a 
bay, but the mouth of a river, and a very great river 
indeed; and this implied yet another discovery — that men 
had to reckon with no mere island or narrow peninsula, 
but an immense continent, which it remained to explore. 
Jesus Christ was in himself a very great discovery for 
those to whom he gave himself, and the exploration of 
him shows a somewhat similar story. Men have often 
said that they see nothing in him very different from the 
rest of us; while others have found in him, in the phrase 
of the Apocalypse (Rev. xxii. 1), the "water of life"; 
and the positive announcement is here, as in the other 
case, the more important of the two. The discovery of 
the volume of life, which comes from Jesus Christ, is one 
of the greatest that men have made. Merely to have 
dipped his bucket, as it were, in that great stream of life 
has again and again meant everything to a man. Think 
of what the new-found river of the New World meant to 
some of those early explorers after weeks at sea — 

Water, water everywhere, 
Nor any drop to drink — 

and they reach an immense flood of river-water. It was 
new life at once; but it did not necessarily mean the im- 
mediate exploration of everything, the instant completion 
of geographical discovery. It was life and the promise 
of more to follow. The history of the Church is a record, 



JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 209 

we may put it, both of the discovery of the River of 
Life and of the exploration of its course and its sources, 
and of what lies behind it. But the discovery and the 
exploration are different things, and the first is quicker 
and more certain than the second. Most of us will admit 
that we have not gone very far up into that Continent. 
The object of this chapter is not to attempt to survey or 
compendiarize Christian exploration of Jesus, but to try 
to find for ourselves a new approach to an estimate of the 
historical figure who has been and remains the center of 
everything. 

We may classify the records of the Christian explora- 
tion roughly in three groups. In the early Christian 
centuries, we find endless thought given to the philo- 
sophical study of the relation of Christ and God. It fills 
the library of the Early Church, and practically all the 
early controversies turn upon it. The weak spot in all 
this was the use of the a priori method. Men started 
with preconceptions about God — not unnaturally, for we 
all have some theories about God, which we are apt to 
regard as knowledge. But knowledge is a difficult thing 
to reach in any sphere of study; and men assumed too 
quickly that they had attained a sound philosophical ac- 
count of God. They over-estimated their actual knowl- 
edge of God and did not recognize to the full the im- 
portance of their new experience. This may seem 
ungenerous to men, who gave life and everything for 
Jesus Christ, and to whose devotion, to whose love of 
Jesus, we owe it that we know him — an ungenerous 
criticism of their brave thinking, and their independence 
in a hundred ways of old tradition. Still it is true that 
the weakness of much of their Christology — and of ours 



210 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

— is that it starts with a borrowed notion of God, which 
really has very little to do with the Christian religion. 
To this we shall return; but in the meantime we may 
note that here as elsewhere preconceptions have to be 
lightly held by the serious student. Huxley once wrote 
to Charles Kingsley: "Science seems to me to teach in the 
highest and strongest manner the great truth that is 
embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender 
to the will of God. Sit down before the fact as a little 
child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, 
follow humbly wherever and to whatever end Nature 
leads, or you shall learn nothing. ... I have only begun 
to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved 
at all risks to do this." So Huxley wrote about the study 
of natural science. In this great inquiry of ours we have 
to learn to be patient enough — we might say, ignorant 
enough — to do the same. The Early Church had a faith in 
Greek philosophy, which stood in its way, brave and 
splendid as its thinkers were. 

Our second group is represented roughly by the Hymn 
Book. The evidential value of a good hymn book will 
stand investigation. Of course a great many hymns are 
mere copies, and poor copies; but the Hymn Book at its 
best is a collection of first-hand records of experience. 1 
In the story of the Christian Church doxology comes 



1 Perhaps one may quote here, not inappropriately, the famous 
saying of Aristotle in his Poetics, that " poetry is a more philo- 
sophic thing than history, and of a higher seriousness." The 
latter term means that the poet is " more in earnest ' about his 
work, and puts more energy of mind into it than the historian. 
If the reader hesitates about this, let him try to write a great hymn 
or poem. 



JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 211 

before dogma. When the writer of the Apocalypse breaks 
out at the very beginning: "Unto him that loved us 
and washed 1 us from our sins in his own blood ... be 
glory and dominion for ever and ever" (Rev. i. 5), he is 
recording a great experience; and his doxology leads him 
on to an explanation of what he has felt and known — 
to an intellectual judgment and an appreciation of Christ. 
The order is experience — happiness and song — and then 
reflection. The love and the cleansing, and the joy, supply 
the materials on which thought has to work. We have 
always to remember that thought does not strictly supply 
its own material, however much it may help us to find it. 
Philosophy and theology do not give us our facts. Their 
function is to group and interpret them. 

Our third group of records is given to us by the men 
of the Reformation. We have there two great move- 
ments side by side. There is Bible translation, which 
means, in plain language, a decision or conviction on 
the part of scholars and thinkers, that the knowledge 
of the historical Jesus, and of men's first experiences 
of him, is of the highest importance in the Christian 
life, The whole Reformation follows, or runs parallel 
with, that movement. It is essentially a new explora- 
tion of what Jesus Christ can do and of what he can be. 

In dealing with all these three groups of records, we 
have to note the seriousness of the men who made the 
experiments, their energy of mind, their determination to 
reach real facts and, in Cromwell's great phrase, to 
"speak things." They will have the truth of the matter. 

^■i. .i — 

1 Do not let us be misled by the thin pedantries of the Revised 
Version here, or in Romans v. 1 shortly to be cited. In both places 
literary and spiritual sense has bowed to the accidents of MSS. 



212 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

Intricate and entangled as is the history, for instance, of 
the Arian controversy — that controversy which "turned 
on a diphthong," as Carlyle said in his younger days — it 
represented far more than mere logomachy, as Carlyle saw 
later on. It followed from a determination to get at the 
real fact of who and what Jesus Christ is; and the two 
words, that differed by a diphthong, embodied diametri- 
cally opposite conceptions of him. With all the super- 
subtlety that sometimes characterizes theologians, these 
men had a passion for truth. It led them into paths where 
our minds find a difficulty in following; but the motive 
was the imperative sense that thinking men must ex- 
amine and understand their supreme experience — a motive 
that must weigh with men who are in earnest about life. 

The great hymns of the Church — such as the Dies Irce 
of Thomas of Celano, or Bernard's Jesu dulcis memoria, or 
Toplady's Rock of Ages — are transcripts from life, made 
by deep-going and serious minds. The writers are re- 
cording, with deep conviction of its worth, what they have 
discovered in experience. A man who takes Christ 
seriously and will "examine life," will often find in those 
great hymns, it may be with some surprise, an anticipa- 
tion of his own experience — as Bunyan did in Luther's 
Commentary on Galatians. Livingstone had Jesu dulcis 
memoria — the Latin of it — ringing in his head as he 
traveled in unexplored Africa. Men who did such work 
— work that lasts and is recognized again and again to be 
genuine by others busy in the same field — cannot have 
been random, light-hearted creatures. They were, in fact, 
men tested in life, men of experience — of wide and deep 
experience — men with a gift for living, developed in heart 
as well as in brain. The finest of Greek critics, Longinus, 



JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 213 

said that, "The great style (hupsos) is an echo of a great 
soul.' J Neander said — and it is again and again true — 
that "it is the heart that makes the theologian." Where 
we find a great hymn or a great theology, we may be 
sure of finding a great nature and a great experience 
behind it. 

; Let us sum up our general results so far. First of all, 
wtiatever be the worth of the consensus of Christian 
opinion — and we have to decide how much it is worth, 
bearing in mind the type of man who has worked and 
suffered to make it in every age; and, I think, it runs 
high, as the work of serious and explorative minds — the 
consensus of Christian opinion gives the very highest 
name to Jesus Christ. Men, who did not begin with any 
preconception in his favor, and who have often had a 
great deal of difficulty in explaining to others — and per- 
haps to themselves — the course by wilich they have 
reached their conclusions, claim the utmost for Jesus — 
and this in spite of the most desperate philosophical diffi- 
culties about monotheism. With a strong sense of fact, 
with a deepening feeling for reality, with a growing value 
for experience, and with bolder ventures upon experience, 
men have found that their conception of Jesus deepens 
and grows; he means more to them the more they are. 
And, as was noted in the first chapter, in a rational uni- 
verse, where truth counts and error fails, the Church has 
risen in power with every real emphasis laid on Jesus 
Christ. What does this involve? 

So far our records. To-day we are living in an era 
when great scientific discoveries are made, and more are 
promised. Geology once unsettled people about Genesis; 
but closer study of the Bible and of science has given 



214 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

truer views of both, and thinking people are as lit- 
tle troubled about geology now as about Gopernican 
astronomy. At present heredity and psychology are 
dominating our minds — or, rather, theories as to both; for 
though beginnings have been made, the stage has not 
yet been reached of very wide or certain discovery. There 
is still a great deal of the soul unexplored and unmapped. 
No reasonable person would wish to belittle the study 
either of evolution or of psychology; but the real men 
of science would probably urge that lay people should 
take more pains to know the exact meaning and scope of 
scientific terms, and to have some more or less clear idea 
in their minds when they use them. However, all these 
modern discoveries and theories are, to many men's 
minds, a challenge to the right of Christians to speak 
of Jesus Christ as they have spoken of him, a challenge 
to our right to represent the facts of Christian life as 
we have represented them — in other words, they are a 
challenge to us to return to experience and to see what 
we really mean. If our study of Jesus in the preceding 
chapters has been on sound lines, we shall feel that the 
challenge to face facts is in his vein; it was what he urged 
upon men throughout. 

The old problem returns upon us: Who and what is 
this Jesus Christ? We are involved in the recurrent 
need to re-examine him and re-explore him. 

There are several ways of doing so. Like every other 
historical character Jesus is to be known by what he 
does rather than by a priori speculation as to what he 
might be. In the study of history the first thing is to 
know our original documents. There are the Gospels, 
and, like other historical records, they must be studied 



JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 215 

in earnest on scientific lines without preconception. And 
there are later records, which tell us as plainly and as 
truthfully of what he has done in the world's history. We 
can begin, then, with the serious study of the actual 
historical Jesus, whom people met in the road and with 
whom they ate their meals, whom the soldiers nailed to 
the cross, whom his disciples took to worshiping, and who 
has, historically, re-created the world. 

The second line of approach is rather more difficult, 
but with care we can use Christological theories to re- 
cover the facts which those who framed the theories 
intended to explain. We must remember here once 
more the three historical canons laid down at the be- 
ginning. We must above all things give the man's term 
his meaning, and ask what was the experience behind his 
thought. When we come upon such descriptions of Jesus 
as "Christ our Passover" (1 Cor. v. 7), or find him called 
the Messiah, we must not let our own preconceptions as 
to the value of the theories implied by the use of such 
language, nor again our existing views of what is ortho- 
dox, determine our conclusions; but we must ask what 
those who so explained Jesus really meant to say, and 
what they had experienced which they thought worth 
expressing. These people, as we see, were face to face 
with a very great new experience, and they cast about for 
some means of describing and explaining it. A slight 
illustration may suggest the natural law in accordance 
with which they set about their task of explanation. A 
child, of between two and three years old, was watching 
his first snow-storm, gazing very intently at the flying 
snow-flakes, and evidently trying to think out what 
they were. At last he hit it; they were "little birds/' 



216 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

It is so that the mind, infant or adult, is apt to work — 
explaining the new and unknown by reference to the 
familiar. Snow-flakes are not little birds; they are some- 
thing quite different; yet there is a common element — 
they both go flying through the air, and it was that fact 
which the child's brain noticed and used. To explain 
Jesus, his friends and contemporaries spoke of him as 
the Logos, the Sacrifice, "Christ our Passover/ 3 the 
Messiah, and so forth. Of those terms not one is intel- 
ligible to us to-day without a commentary. To ordinary 
people Jesus is at once intelligible — far more so than the 
explanations of him. Historically, it is he himself who 
has antiquated every one of those conceptions, and, so 
far as they have survived, it has been in virtue of asso- 
ciation with him. They are the familiar language of 
another day. "No one," said Dr. Rendel Harris, "can 
sing, 'How sweet the name of Logos sounds/ Synesius 
of Cyrene did try to sing it, but most human beings prefer 
St. Bernard or John Newton. 

The inner significance of each term will point to the 
real experience of the man using it. He employs a meta- 
phor, a simile, or a technical term to explain something. 
Can we penetrate to the analogy which he finds between 
the Jesus of the new experience and the old term which 
he uses? Can we, when we see what he has experienced, 
grasp the substance and build on that to the neglect of 
the term? When we look at the terms, we find that the es- 
sence of sacrifice was reconciliation between God and man 
(we shall return to this a little later), and that the Messiah 
was understood to be destined to achieve God's purpose 
and God's meaning for mankind and for each man. We 
find, again, that the inner meaning of the Logos is that 



JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 217 

through it, and in it, God and man come in touch with 
each other and become mutually intelligible. Reconcilia- 
tion, the victory of God, the mutual intelligibility of God 
and man — all three terms center in one great thought, a 
new union between God and man. That, so far as I 
can see, is the common element; and that is, as men 
have conceived it, the very heart of the Christian experi- 
ence. 

In the third place, we can utilize the new experiments 
made upon Jesus Christ in the Reformation and in other 
revivals. They come nearer to us; for the men who re- 
port are more practical and more scholarly in the modern 
way; they are more akin to us both in blood and in ideas. 
Luther, for example, is a great spirit of the explorer type. 
He went to scholarship and learnt the true meaning of 
metanoia— that it was "re-thinking' ' and not "penance" 
— and he grasped a new view of God there. From scholar- 
ship he gained a truer view of Church history than he had 
been taught; and this too helped to clear his mind. Above 
all, as "a great son of fact" (Carlyle's name for him), his 
chief interest was the exploration of Jesus Christ — would 
Christ stand all the weight that a man could throw upon 
him without assistance? And Luther found that Christ 
could; and he at once turned his knowledge into action, as 
the world knows. "Justification by faith" was his phrase, 
and he meant that we may trust Jesus Christ with all 
that we are, all that we have been, and all that we hope 
to be; that Jesus himself will carry all; that Jesus himself 
is all; that Jesus is at once Luther's eternal salvation, and 
his sure help in the next day's difficulty — his Saviour for 
ever from sin, and his great stand-by in translating the 
Bible for the German people and in writing hymns for 



218 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

boys and girls. 1 Nos nihil sumus> he wrote, Christus solus 
est omnia. In the case of every great revival — the Wes- 
leyan revival, and the smaller ones in the United States, 
in the north of Ireland, in Wales — in every one we find 
that, where anything is really achieved, it is done by a 
new and thoroughgoing emphasis on Jesus Christ. It 
may be put in language which to some ears is repulsive, in 
metaphors strange or uncouth; but whatever the language, 
the fact that underlies it is this — men are brought back 
to the reality, the presence, the power, and the friendship 
of Jesus Christ; they are called to a fresh venture on 
Jesus Christ, a fresh exploration: and again and again 
the experience of a lifetime has justified the venture. 

This brings us to the most effective and fundamental 
method in the exploration of Jesus, in some ways the 
most difficult of all, or else the very simplest. The Church 
has been clear that there is nothing like personal experi- 
ment, the personal venture. It is the only clue to the 
experience. The saying of one of the old Latin fathers, 
Credo ut intelligam, is to many of our minds offensive — 
I think, because we give the wrong meaning to his Credo. 
But, if the illustrations are not too simple, swimming and 
bicycling offer parallels. A man will never understand 
how water holds up a human body, as long as he stays on 
dry land. In practical things, the venture comes first; 
and it is hard to see how a man is to understand Christ 
without a personal experience of him. All parents know 
how much better bachelors and maiden sisters understand 
children than they do; but as soon as these great authori- 



1 If my readers do not know his Christmas hymn for children, 
they have missed one of the happiest hymns for Christmas. 



JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 219 

ties have children of their own, the position is altered a 
little. 

The change that Jesus definitely operates in men, they 
have described in various ways — rebirth, salvation, a new 
heart, and so forth. What they have always emphasized 
in Jesus Christ, is that they find he changes their outlook 
and develops new instincts in them, and that in one way 
and another he saves from sin; and they have been men 
who have learnt and adopted Jesus' own estimate of sin. 
When, then, we remember that, with his serious view of 
sin, he undertook man's redemption from it; when we 
add to this some real reflection upon how much he has 
already done, as plain matter of history, to "take away 
the sin of the world," we surely have something to go 
upon in our attempt to determine who he is. The question 
will rise, Have Christians overstated their experience, or 
even misunderstood it? Has forgiveness been, in fact, 
achieved — or salvation from sin? Can sin be put away 
at all? What will the evidence for this be? I do not 
know what the evidence could be, except the new life of 
peace with God, and all the sunshine and blessing that 
go with it. This new life is at all events all the evidence 
available; and how much it means is very difficult to esti- 
mate without some personal experience. 

Here again the great theories of Redemption will help 
us to recover the experience they are to explain; and once 
more we may note that they are not the work of small 
minds or trivial natures, however badly they have been 
echoed. Substitution implies at any rate some serious 
confession of guilt before God, some strong sense of a 
great indebtedness to Christ. The theory of Sacrifice im- 
plies the need of reunion with God. Robertson Smith, in 






220 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

his "Early Religion of the Semites," brings out that the 
essence of ancient sacrifice was that the tribe, the sacri- 
ficial beast and the god were all of one blood; the god was 
supposed to be alienated; the sacrifice was offered by the 
party to the quarrel who was seeking reconciliation, 
namely, the tribe. When we look at the New Testament, 
we find that the emphasis always lies on God seeking 
reconciliation with man (cf. 2 Cor. v. 19). The theory of 
ransom — a most moving term in a world of slavery — 
implies the need of new freedom for the mind, for the 
heart and the whole nature, from the tyranny of sin. All 
these are similes; and tremendous structures of theory 
have been built on every one of them — and for some of 
these structures, simile, or, in plainer language, analogy, 
is not a sufficient foundation. It is probably true that all 
our current explanations of the work of Christ in Redemp- 
tion have in them too large an element of metaphor and 
simile. Yet Christian people are reluctant to discard any 
one of them; and their reluctance is intelligible. There is 
a value in the old association, which is found by new ex- 
perience. Every one of these old similes will contribute to 
our realization of the work of Christ, in so far as it is a 
record of experience of Christ, verified in one generation 
after another. We shall make the best use of them, when 
we are no longer intimidated by the terminology, but go 
at once to what is meant — to the facts. 

We come still closer to the facts in the less metaphorical 
terms of the New Testament. For example, there is the 
New Covenant. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
went back to a great phrase in Jeremiah, and by his em- 
phasis on it he helped to give its name to the whole New 
Testament — "I will make a new covenant with the house 



JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 221 

of Israel and the house of Judah" (Heb. viii. 8-12; Jer. 
xxxi. 31-34). Using this passage, he brings out that there 
is a new relation, a new union, between God and man in 
Jesus. He speaks of Jesus as a mediator bringing man 
and God together (Heb. viii. 6) — language far plainer to 
us than the terminology of sacrifice, which he employed 
rather to bring home the work of Jesus with feeling and 
passion to those who had no other vocabulary, than to 
impose upon Christian thinkers a scheme of things which 
he clearly saw to be exhausted. Then there is Paul's 
great conception of Reconciliation (2 Cor. v. 18-20). Half 
the difficulties connected with the word "Atonement" dis- 
appear, when we grasp that the word in Greek means 
primarily reconciliation. As Paul uses the noun and the 
verb, it is very plain what he means — God is in Christ 
trying to reconcile the world to himself. These attempts 
to express Christ's work in plain words take us back to 
the great central Christian experience — to the great initial 
discovery that the discord of man's making between God 
and man has been removed by God's overtures in Christ; 
that the obstacles which man has felt to his approach to 
God — in the unclean hands and the unclean lips — have 
been taken away; and that with a heart, such as the 
human heart is, a man may yet come to God in Jesus, 
because of Jesus, through Jesus. 

The historical character of Christian life and thought is 
surely evidence that Jesus Christ has accomplished some- 
thing real; and w^hen we get a better hold of that, the 
problem of his person should be more within our reach. 
The splendid phrase of Paul — "Therefore being justified 
by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus 
Christ" (Rom. v. 1) — or that of 1 Peter: "In whom ye 



222 THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

rejoice . . . with joy unspeakable and full of glory" 
(1 Pet. i. 8) — gives us the keynote. The gaiety of the 
Early Church in its union with Jesus Christ rings through 
the New Testament and the Christian fathers from Hermas 
to Augustine. The Church has come singing down the 
ages. 1 The victory over sin — no easy thing at any time — 
is another permanent feature of Christian experience. The 
psychological value of what Dr. Chalmers called "the 
expulsive power of a new affection" is not enough studied 
by us. Look at the freedom, the growth, the power of the 
Christian life — where do they all come from? We cannot 
leave God out of this. At any rate, there they are in the 
Christian experience; and where does anything that mat- 
ters flow from but from God? There is again the evidence 
of Christian achievement; and it should be remarked that 
the Christian always tells us that he himself has not the 
power, that it comes from God, that he asks for it and 
God gives it. As for the easy explanation of all religious 
life by "auto-suggestion," we may note that it involves a 
loose and unscientific use of a more or less scientific theory 
— never a very safe way to knowledge. In any case, it has 
been pointed out, the word adds nothing to the number of 
our facts; nor is it quite clear yet that it eliminates God 
from the story any more than the term "digestion" makes 
it inappropriate to say Grace before meat. All these 
things — peace, joy, victory, and the rest — follow from the 
taking away of sin, and imply that it no longer stands 
between God and man. All this is the work of the his- 
torical Jesus. It is he who has changed the attitude of 

1 What Carlyle says in " The Hero as a Poet " {Heroes and 
Hero Worship) on the close relation of Song and Truth is worth 
remembering in this connection. 






JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 223 

man to God, and by changing it has made it possible for 
God to do what he has done. If God, in Paul's phrase, 
"hath shined in our hearts" (2 Cor. iv. 6), it was Jesus 
who induced men to take down the shutters and to open 
the windows. It is all associated, historically, with the 
ever-living Jesus Christ, and with God in him. 

This brings us to the central question, the relation of 
Jesus with God — the problem of Incarnation. After all 
that has been said, we shall not approach it a priori. We 
are too apt to put the Incarnation more or less in alge- 
braic form : 

x + y = a, 

where a stands for the historical Jesus Christ, and x and 
y respectively for God and man. But what do we mean 
by x and y? Let us face our facts. What do we know 
of man apart from Jesus Christ? Surely it is only in him 
that we realize man — only in him that we grasp what 
human depravity really is, the real meaning and implica- 
tions of human sin. It is those who have lived with Jesus 
Christ, who are most conscious of sin; and this is no 
mere morbid imagination or fancy, it rests on a much 
deeper exploration of human nature than men in general 
attempt. Not until we know what he is do we see how 
very little we are, and how far we have gone wrong. It is 
his power of help and sympathy that teaches us the 
hardness of our own hearts, our own fundamental want 
of sympathy. Again, until a man knows Jesus Christ, he 
has little chance of even guessing the grandeur of which 
he himself is capable. A man has, as he says, done his 
best — for years, it may be, of strenuous endeavor; and 
then comes the new experience of Jesus Christ, and he is 
lifted high above his record, he gains a new power, a new 



ZU THE JESUS OF HISTORY 

tenderness, and he does things incredible. We do not 
know the wrong or the right of which man is capable, till 
we know Jesus Christ. The y of our equation, then, does 
not tell us very much. 

When it comes to the x, is it not very often a mixture 
— an ill-adjusted mixture — of the Father of Jesus, with 
the rather negative "beyond all being" of later Greek 
speculation, and perhaps the Judge of Roman law? The 
exact proportions in the mixture will vary with the 
thinker. But, in fact, is it not true now that we really 
only know God through Jesus? For it is only in and 
through Jesus that we take the trouble, and have the 
faith, to explore and test God, to try experiments upon 
God, to know what he can do and what he will do. It is 
only in Jesus that the Love of God, in the New Testament 
sense, is tenable at all. It is evanescent apart from Jesus; 
it rests on the assurance of his words, his work, his per- 
sonality. A vague diffused "love of God" for everything 
in general and nothing in particular, we saw to be a quite 
different thing from the personal attachment, with which, 
according to Jesus, God loves the individual man. That 
is the center of the Gospel; it is belief in that, which has 
done everything in a rational world, as we saw at the 
beginning; and it is a most impossible belief, never long 
or very actively held apart from Jesus. Only in him can 
we believe it. Only in him, too, is the new experience of 
God's forgiveness and redemption possible, in all its ful- 
ness and sureness and power. "Dieu ine /pardonnera" said 
Heine, "c'est son metier"; but he ii^d n^~ Jit Christian 
sense of what it was that God was to forgive. It is only 
in Jesus that we can live the real life of prayer, in the 
intimate way of Jesus. All this means that we have to 



- JESUS IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT 225 

solve our x from Jesus — not to discover him through it. 
The plain fact is that we actually know Jesus a great deal 
better than we know our x and our y, the elements from 
which we hoped to reconstruct him. What does this 
mean? 

It means, bluntly, that we have to re-think our theories 
of Incarnation on a posteriori lines, to begin on facts that 
we know, and to base ourselves on a continuous explora- 
tion and experience of Jesus Christ first. The simple, 
homely rule of knowing things before we talk about them 
holds in every other sphere of study, and it is the rule 
which Jesus himself inculcated. We begin, then, with 
Jesus Christ, and set out to see how far he will take us. 
Experience comes first. "Follow me," he said. He chose 
the twelve men "that they might be with him,' 3 and he 
let them find out in that intercourse what he had for 
them; and from what he could give and did give they 
drew their conclusions as to who and what he is. There 
can be no other way of knowing him. "Luther's Refor- 
mation doctrines,' ' says Hermann, in his fine book, The 
Union of the Christian with God (p. 163), "only coun- 
tenance such a confession of the Deity of Christ as springs 
naturally to the lips of the man whom Jesus has already 
made blessed." Melanchthon said the same: "This it is 
to know Christ — to receive his benefits — not to contem- 
plate his natures, or the modes of his incarnation." 
"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, 
and I will give you rest." 






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